Portishead
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What had seemed like a mess became brilliant once I realized its inherent cohesion thrived on looseness. Wolf’s early recordings for Sun achieved the same stunning qualities with an even more glorious gutbucket sound. Since that moment of recognition–the beauty of both imperfection and spatial dynamics in music–I’ve been drawn to gritty stuff. I like noise a whole lot, but I really appreciate it when someone does something interesting with it: contextualizing, reshaping, destroying it.
Hip-hop has long blended scratching and other cacophonous noise into its background beats, but only in the last few years has it become the meat on the bones. The Beastie Boys, with their exhilaratingly strident mix of rock with hip-hop, have employed lots of guitar feedback, and the perpetual digging through crates by DJs searching for rare grooves to sample often means loads of surface noise. Dub reggae records, particularly more radical ones, have celebrated swooping snatches of electronically treated sounds.
The band couldn’t have accentuated their calculated cool more blatantly than they did at the Vic. Stoic under blue light all evening, Gibbons leaned on the mike stand chain-smoking and enraptured in song. The candles that filled the room added to the nightclub atmosphere already created by her chanteuse pose. To Barrow’s credit Portishead came as a full band and didn’t have to face the pounding destruction of subtlety most live DJ-backed hip-hop brings. The result was that they sounded cleaner live than they do on record. A drummer simulated some of the album’s mechanically reproduced rhythm loops. While Dummy employs plenty of real instruments, part of its accomplishment is rooting its sound in sample technology. By the conclusion of Portishead’s short set, however, the relentlessness of their mid-tempo beats and carefully restrained textures began to drag them down. Whereas most straight hip-hop explodes with uncontained energy and sinks because it can’t go any higher, Portishead seemed to have the same problem many rungs down the energy ladder.
