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1994
Portishead ? Ce groupe n'en est qu'à son second album et déjà il fait figure de mythe. On se souvient de "Dummy", il y a trois ans, chef d'oeuvre sombre et mélodique du trip hop, symbole avec Massive du nouveau son de Bristol. Cette fois, leur opus n'a même plus de titre. Juste la musique, quasiment sans sampling, plus lente, profonde et torturée que jamais. Un peu comme du Isaac Hayes sous prozac, avec Enio Morricone dans le rôle d'un serial killer et le Marquis de Sade en invité surprise. Vinyls qui crachent. Ambiance bas-fonds londoniens dévorés par la brume. De sa voix sensuelle, perverse, chirurgicale, Beth Gibbons fait parfois pleurer. Portishead a une âme. Sortie le 27 septembre. Après la surprise du merveilleux premier album dont on ne saurait se lasser, le cap du second LP eût pu être périlleux. Cependant, là où beaucoup trépassent, Portishead se surpasse. Pourtant, rien de nouveau sous le soleil. La révolution a déjà été menée en 95... avec " Dummy ". Fait à la fois de plus d’acharnement patient, et de moins de timidité, cet album éponyme précise les contours d’un désespoir jusqu’ici " impressionniste ", et se rapproche (sans toutefois y perdre son âme) du blues de cire de Julee Cruise et du sadcore décharné de Swell. La magie (noire) repose sur un double décalage : douceur/violence (Beth vs. Geoff ?) et classicisme/avant-gardisme. Les mauvais traitements infligés à la douce voix de Beth, transpercée de part en part des flashes noirs de " All mine ", noyée dans l’étouffant tourbillon de " Half day closing ", éventée par un " Morning air " à l’inquiétante phosphorescence, ou encore prisonnière de la petite boîte hermétiquement close de " Cowboys ", laissent dans le creux de l’oreille une mélodie douce-amère. A côté de cela, au classicisme (relatif) de la structure musicale s’oppose l’iconoclasme (marqué) des sonorités. A bien des égards, ce disque est une reconnaissance du frottement et du grésillement comme objets musicaux. Maître es-intensité, Portishead n’a pas fini de nous faire frissonner. (PhTh) Portishead's debut album Dummy popularized trip-hop, making its slow, narcotic rhythms, hypnotic samples and film-noir production commonplace among sophisticated, self-consciously "mature" pop fans. The group recoiled from such widespread acclaim and influence, taking three years to deliver their eponymous second album. On the surface, Portishead isn't all that dissimilar from Dummy, but its haunting, foreboding sonic textures makes it clear that the group isn't interested in the crossover success of such fellow travellers as Sneaker Pimps. Upon repeated plays, the subtle differences between the two albums become clear. Geoff Barrow and Adrian Utley recorded original music that they later sampled for the backing tracks on the album, giving the record a hazy, dreamlike quality that shares many of the same signatures of Dummy, but is darker and more adventurous. Beth Gibbons has taken the opportunity to play up her tortured diva role to the hilt, emoting wildly over the tracks. Her voice is electronically phased on most of the tracks, adding layers to the claustrophobic menace of the music. The sonics on Portishead would make it an impressive follow-up, but what seals its success is the remarkable songwriting. Throughout the album, the group crafts impeccable modern-day torch songs, from the frightening, repetitive "Cowboys" to the horn-punctuated "All Mine," which justify the detailed, engrossing production. The end result is an album that reveals more with each listen and becomes more captivating and haunting each time it's played. Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All-Music Guide
When Portishead released their debut album "Dummy", they captivated listeners with their totally original sound. Although the past three years have seen many imitators, Portishead continues to innovate on their second album "Portishead". Instead of using outside sources, they wrote and recorded the majority of their music, then sampled and looped it. This unique but time-consuming approach lends their songs a cinematic, full-bodied sound. Add in Beth Gibbons' heartfelt lyrics and evocative singing, and the result is a hauntingly beautiful album that defies categorization. Every year demands its dance crossover record: a 3 Feet High & Rising, Club Classics Vol. 1, Blue Lines or Connected to ferry the illicit products of club culture up the charts and into dinner parties for grown-ups. For some reason, it's always hip hop rather than house that makes the leap. After all, dance culture is only the latest expression of the British fascination with urban currents of Black America that got us into rock'n'roll in the first place. It's as if that music can give us what most rock records no longer can: a way to dance, be happy, and love the life we have. The hip hop crossover album of 1994, however, was no party record, and its authors strayed a long way from the popular notion of a hip hop blueprint. Portishead were formed by young multi-instrumentalist and producer Geoff Barrow while he was on an Enterprise Allowance scheme in Bristol. They named themselves after a nondescript dock town near their city (following the hometown tradition of hip hop: Watts Prophets, Sugarhill Gang, Cypress Hill). Their first album Dummy possessed the key attributes of a DJ record - the grainy breakbeats, the thrill of arrhythmic scratching, the punchy, truncated melodies and the sense of unfathomable separateness from the world of rock - but in its astonishing melancholy it felt like nothing that had gone before. In the place of the soul and funk samples that drove American hip hop, there were now mournful snippets from the soundtracks of Lalo Schifrin, film effects, dulcimers, engaged tones from telephones, even Johnnie Ray. It was too slow, too funereal, to contemplate dancing to. Some of the songs sounded like they had been remastered from ancient 78s. In place of a rapper or vocal samples, there was Beth Gibbons, whose sad, brittle voice circled obsessively around themes of rejection, loss, anxiety and terrible isolation. Sometimes she sounded like Billie Holiday, at others like Polly Harvey singing from the end of a long tunnel, and the record seemed to revolve around the moment on Sour Times when she sang (or cried), "Nobody loves me". That she added "... not like you do" a bar later did not alter Dummy's cumulative meaning. Teenage loneliness is a mainstay of pop, but its hidden comfort is that it always knows it's a temporary stage. If there was a more powerful and exacting evocation of terminal, hopeless adult loneliness than Dummy, it must only have been available on prescription. Yet, despite this sonic queasiness and personal damage, Dummy was still a hip hop record, the way Beck or Massive Attack are hip hop. Hip hop in the sense of making music out of surrounding records and sounds. With few exceptions, white people generally make rotten hip hop. Portishead solved that problem by turning their very whiteness into Dummy's subject matter. For 45 minutes it seemed conceivable that the world's most popular music had not been invented at Bronx block parties at the end of the '70s at all. Instead it seemed far older, a product of '60s spy themes, '50s crooners and '40s torch singers. Gibbons's snowy whisper and Barrow's spectral soundscapes added up to an authentic blues for the next century. Within 18 months of its release, Dummy had sold almost two million copies, won the Mercury Music Prize, and begotten more bad trip hop acts than are worth counting. It also drove Barrow into a mental cul-de-sac from which he thought he would never be able to make music again. So yes, it is a difficult second album but, initially, it's hard to see what the problem was. At first listen, Portishead resembles nothing so much as sides three and four of Dummy. The beats stroll past with the dignity of a New Orleans jazz funeral, Gibbons hasn't cheered up any, and Barrow's signature instrument, that old science fiction gadget the Theremin, flits across these frosty landscapes. It'll take a couple of days before the fullness and beauty of these 11 new songs becomes clear, but when it does, it's as if Portishead have created the first truly British soul music in 30 years. And like the greatest soul music, it is almost cinematic in its sense of place. Portishead opens with Cowboys. A shimmer of hi-hats introduces a choir of humming cowpokes and Gibbons promising, "Don't despair, this day will be the darnedest day ..." The scene is Wand'rin' Star but the action is Play Misty For Me, with obsessive love and betrayal mirrored in the alternated slash and hack of Adrian Utley's guitar and Barrow's turntable scratching. On the first single All Mine, a platoon of horns paces past a screen of Bond film strings in stately disdain, while Gibbons proclaims her devotion to some lucky soul: "No mistake, you can't escape/Tethered and tied, there's nowhere to hide from me." Portishead's medium and the message have grown in scope and intertwined. Dummy's series of chilly bulletins from a desperate mind has turned outwards to become a more rounded view of the world, with Gibbons as the vengeful diva of modern relationships. This time, her "Nobody loves me" moment is yet more transfixing. "We suffer every day. What is it for?" she sings at the start of Only You, while distant, atonal trumpets mutter away like the voice of her subconscious. Its nerveless delivery shows how she's found her place as a singer. As before, the words don't strictly matter, it's what she does with them that counts, and on Portishead she stretches her vocal presence into new and unnerving shapes. She's even started doing other singers and personas (Shirley Bassey on Seven Months, Cruella De Vil on Over), as if she's some kind of diabolical sampler herself. At the climax of Half Day Closing, she arcs higher up the scale than on any of her previous records - torch-singer metamorphosing into banshee - and then, as Barrow's cheesy synthesizer plays an ironic countermelody, some arcane piece of technology takes hold of her and launches her higher still. Your spine will chill as your wine glass explodes: there is no band on Earth sounding like this right now. A broader variety than on Dummy slowly reveals itself. Over is tight and subdued, leaning heavily on Utley's picked guitar; Humming is a suite for towering strings and Theremin, with someone playing a solo on what may well prove to be a dentist's drill. On Elysium, Gibbons sounds like she's surrounded by Hitchcock's marauding birds. Undenied is the furthest-out of all, with Barrow's lonesome electric piano wreathed in barbed-wire surface noise and Gibbons sounding more desperate than ever. It is genuinely difficult to listen to, like Eraserhead translated into hip hop balladry. Not because of the ceaseless white noise, but because of Gibbons's appalling nakedness before the microphone. In resigned tones, she seems to be singing, "There goes my heart ... leaving home". The authority of sadness is everywhere. On each song, Portishead sound less and less like a conflation of influences, and more and more like themselves. There are only two samples on Portishead, and most of what seem to be samples are actually original instrumental parts, written and produced by Barrow, processed (in some cases actually pressed onto vinyl) so that they sound like they've come off another record. This, apparently, is how Barrow freed himself from the writer's block that delayed this album for a year and sent it four times over budget. In a sense it doesn't matter - most of the samples on Dummy were too obscure for anyone to know where they came from anyway - but Portishead close the circle by burying bogus arguments about originality. They have invented a whole new history for their sounds, which come from records that never existed in the first place, but are nevertheless full of wonderful possibilities. Hearing, say, Humming is like finding a new room in the house that you've lived in all your life. The final surprise of Portishead is that this unrelievedly bleak music becomes, in the end, strangely cheering. On the closer, Western Eyes, the final voice is not that of Beth Gibbons, but a sodden lounge singer blearily crooning, "I feel so cold, all hookers and gin - this mess we're in." It's actually another of Barrow's false samples, sung by a friend called Sean Atkins from Bristol band The Whores Of Babylon and slowed to Sinatra pace. It's a gag but also another nod to the collective subconscious which Portishead have tapped like few others. Familiarity soothes the pain, we're all in this together, and at least it's good to know the worst. This courage and evenness of spirit is what places Portishead (the band) and Portishead (the record) among the best that pop music has to offer. Like Radiohead, it is progressive pop, dependable and articulate about the unframeable darkness of the human mind. Like The Prodigy, it is an endless top buzz toybox of wayward sonics. It's even like Oasis in their more sensitive moments, in that it speaks with an instinctive directness about universal things: self-doubt, the need for love, our contradictory fear of loneliness and hatred of those who love us. It knows what it is talking about. It's been there. It's still hip hop. And in these days, when every handful of mediocrities thinks they're the best band in the world, and everybody's album is the greatest ever made, Portishead might serve to show a few people what a masterpiece really is. Andrew Harrisson pour Q
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