Product Description

Named for a town near Bristol, England, Portishead is a British dance band that grabs ideas from all over the mod pop world (spaghetti Western guitars, turntable scratching, melancholy soul vocals, atmospheric organs, house beats) and stirs them into spacey, dub-like productions that sound like a dance club in the middle of a "Twin Peaks" dream. You could call it surreal hip-hop pop. But if the beats on the band's debut album achieve a kind of trance-like static, the songs themselves reach for something more rousing. With understatedlyrics and overstated melodies, singer Beth Gibbons and bandleader Geoff Barrow write insinuatingly melancholy dance ballads that ebb and flow like waves through rustling waters. Organs quaver in quiet tremolos, guitars emit squiggles and turntables hiccup, while Gibbons, in a high, cutting voice that evokes a less breathy Sinead O'Connor, sings songs of longing and heartbreak with equally palpable emotion.

Track Listing

1. Mysterons
2. Sour times
3. Strangers
4. It could be sweet
5. Wandering star
6. Numb
7. Roads
8. Pedestal
9. Biscuit
10. Glory box

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #298 in Music
• Released on: 1999-06-18
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 45 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
The collaboration of studio whiz Geoff Barrow and singer Beth Gibbons, Dummy was made at the same time as a short film noir called To Kill a Dead Man, and the same approach--gloomy, tormented, and wildly melodramatic--permeates the album. "Sour Times" (the hit in which Gibbons cries, again and again, "Nobody loves me, it's true") and the more cryptic "Glory Box" are the linchpins of the album, defining its sound: dark flashes of old soul and film music, dehumanised electronic bleeps, Gibbons emoting like she's consumed by shame, and a bass-and-beat pulse derived from the slow bump and grind of the Bristol scene that spawned Barrow's old collaborators, Massive Attack. --Douglas Wolk

Customer Reviews

Simply brilliant
Hmmm, how does one sum up this album in just a few words? Dark, mysterious, melodic, industrial, melancholic, desolate - any or all of these apply. Others have already waxed lyrical about the 'feel' of the album, but I think you really have to listen to it - all of it. Maybe even a few times, as it took a few listens for me to really 'get it'.
As soon as I did 'get it' I totally loved it, and it remains one of the most frequently played albums in my collection even after nearly 15 years.
Never bettered or even equalled by Portishead since in my opinion.

Hauntingly beautiful album-I urge you to buy it!
This album is absolutely brilliant. Vocally, it is pure genius, and musically it is perfectly timed. I have just bought this album, as a replacement for the one I lost in my mispent teenage times! It`s jst as great as I remember it being (unlike many of my music purchases of the 90`s)

end of the evening sheer pleasure.
put this on after you have got rid of all the losers or u have made it home from the pub.
it oooooozes class.