Portishead Keeps Mope Alive
Source: By Sarah Liss
Posted: 05/07/08 2:08PM
Filed Under: Music
This is the quiet revolution, one that’s announced its arrival not with a bang but a whimper—or maybe a cat-like yawn. It’s the sound of trip-hop. You can hear it in the beat-driven, 60s-inspired aesthetic of Bristol, England’s Alpha, who released their The Sky Is Mine CD in North America in February; it’s seeping out of the sleepy, cannabis-coated cuts on Morcheeba’s recent Dive Deep disc. After several well-received tours, trip-hop pioneers Massive Attack are releasing a new album this summer.
Most notably, just when fans and fussy critics had all but left elusive trio Portishead for dead, in late April the Bristol group dropped their third studio album (aptly titled Third), a meticulously layered mix of spectral melodies and found sounds—stuttering machine-gun fire, creaky bluegrass bits that sound like archival recordings. It was met with almost universal acclaim.
Further proof that rumours of their death had been greatly exaggerated: though Portishead had played just one live show (a February 2005 post-tsunami fundraiser in Bristol) since 1999, the group curated and appeared live at last December’s All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in England which was a warm-up for this year’s international tour, beginning with a triumphant headlining spot at the Coachella festival.
Their breed of downtempo electronic music, a slowed-down hip-hop-and-house hybrid based on Rhodes keyboards and nervous turntablism, was ubiquitous back in the mid-90s. The trend began in 1991 with Blue Lines from Massive Attack, also from trip-hop’s de facto hometown, Bristol, England.
This was the heyday of the British rave scene, an era of day-glo smiley faces, silly hats and acid house. DJs were the new superstars. And for kids who stayed up all night partying and doing designer drugs, the emergence of trip-hop was in many ways a no-brainer—when the ecstasy buzz started to fade (or their trips went sour), they needed a soothing soundtrack to assuage serotonin-deprived souls. Electronic producers helped deliver that, creating chilled-out compositions that made good use of the latest mid-century jazz, soul and cinematic score LPs they’d found on their latest crate-digging excursions.
Not that trip-hop was just about taking the edge off. Though it may lack the overt social commentary of the hip-hop that preceded it (some critics knock the appropriative nature of trip-hop, viewing it as the watering down and whitening up of rap), the genre resonates with a palpable sense of uneasiness. It’s no coincidence that it found a foothold in a period of global political unrest; the 90s, if you’ll recall, brought us the first war in Iraq, recession blues and—to borrow the title of a late-90s trip-hop release—pre-millennial tension.
Trip-hop’s popularity peaked in the mid-90s, heralded by a glut of well-received atmospheric acts. Portishead announced their arrival with 1994’s Dummy, a creepy combo of ethereal vocals and samples that evoked old spy movies. Sometime Massive Attack member Tricky ditched his crew to release 95’s rougher Maxinquaye, an intense disc that drew heavily on hip-hop aesthetics. 1996 introduced London’s Morcheeba, whose soulful and stoner-friendly Who Can You Trust? became a dinner-party staple. Across the pond, you had dudes like DJ Shadow, who pieced together evocative soundscapes that fused instrumental hip-hop and ambient jazz; his killer Endtroducing… disc helped define the sound of James Lavelle’s UK-based Mo’ Wax label.
And then trip-hop just kinda faded away, its loping breakbeats stuttering to a final… tired… murmur. So what happened? For starters, most of the artists whose work got tagged as trip-hop were quick to distance themselves from the genre. This isn’t new—the overblown artistic ego is not one that likes to be pigeonholed as merely one example of a greater trend. While the myriad acts grouped under the umbrella term certainly represented a range of individual styles, they shared certain core characteristics (tempo, rhythms, mood, a collective ethos) that gave the trip-hop label an unfortunate connotation of bloodless chill-out music, devoid of personality or creative juice. Thanks to a surfeit of cash-grab compilations, trip-hop became unavoidable, sonically decorating hair salons and slickly designed boutique lounges around the world.
And the very qualities that defined trip-hop—its privileging of ambience over aggression, atmosphere over personality—were scoffed at by its critics, who slammed it for committing music's biggest sin—being boring. Slate’s Jody Rosen noted the genre’s bad rap stems from the fact that chillout music’s “highest artistic ambition seems to be to lull listeners into a soporific state. But what, really,” he added, “is so bad about relaxing music?”
Well, nothing. In fact, those chillaxed, faceless tendencies might be what’s led to the seeming renaissance of trip-hop in today’s cultural climate. Some of the best work by artists who can be loosely grouped under the “trip-hop” umbrella tries, at its core, to evoke a cinematic quality. Not surprisingly, trip-hop tracks have become a staple of au courant film and TV soundtrack supervisors, particularly when the desired vibe is one of foreboding.
The CSI franchise may boast theme songs by the Who, but the stylized cuts and slick editing of its procedural narratives unspool to the sounds of Portishead, Mocean Worker, Gus Gus and Kruder & Dorfmeister. Massive Attack’s Teardrop serves as the plaintive intro of caustic doctor dramedy House, while a track from the band’s 1ooth Window disc sells Smirnoff vodka. Mitsubishi (the car company, not the popular form of mid-90s ecstasy) borrowed a Dirty Vegas track to move automobiles. The more those background noises are subliminally injected into music consumers’ brains, the more likely listeners are to seek out albums that deliver that sound.
Perhaps more importantly, that sense of zeitgeisty anxiety that felt all-pervasive back in trip-hop’s 90s heyday seems to have returned. We’re sick of an inane Mid-East war orchestrated by a Bush; analysts are talking recession and plugging green living. Our collective psyches have come full circle.
Capturing that frayed-nerve disquiet—and jacking it up to 12—is something Portishead have always done marvelously well. In fact, more than any of their peers (save for perhaps Massive Attack and Tricky, early on), the trio imbued their stark, beat-based soundscapes with a sense of urgency and desperation that feels almost uncomfortably human. Listen to the way Beth Gibbons’ plaintive vocals flutter around the hiccupping vinyl scratches and pulsating chords of a track like "Wandering Star," off Dummy; she’s articulating a kind of existential angst (or possibly nihilism) as profound as anything from the Elliott Smith canon.
Portishead do this particularly well on Third. The spooky samples and sporadic breakbeats are still there, but producer Geoff Barrows and producer/guitarist Adrian Uttley have taken particular pains with the sonic textures on each track, cobbling together a dystopian mess of clanks, whirrs, hums and reverberating chords that alternately evoke Teutonic techno, Giorgio Moroder, espionage thrillers where the blood sprays in thick black rivulets, the film Deliverance, the grim aesthetics of industrial music, and, occasionally, sad pop lullabies. For her part, Gibbons sounds even more possessed; her plaintive warbling can bring to mind a straitjacketed mental patient humming to herself in a cloistered cell.
That’s not to say that she’s baring her heart or, y’know, exorcising her personal psychic demons. Curiously, though the raw bruisedness of Gibbons’s voice goes a long way in explaining why Portishead’s music has a distinct character and tremendous (wounded) soul, the singer’s personality feels rather obscured. Her role is to act as a conduit between the listener and the arrangements, some debris to help us stay afloat and find a way through the murky detritus of those dark, sinister soundscapes. Think of Gibbons as a complicated, symbolic (and possibly Rorschach-like) pattern on what could be aural wallpaper. Hyperbolically, she’s a stand-in for Modern Man, navigating a confusing post-industrial world.
It’s a world we’re all stuck navigating, of course, but at least the re-emergence of Portishead (and renaissance of trip-hop) helps us realize we’re not alone in our errant wanderings.
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