Portishead 'Dummy' - has it aged well?

in light of that dude/him/shim/im not sure winning the Mercury last night I thought I'll bring up a old winner (I think).....

I was listening to it today nodding my head severly but then wondered at some tracks whether they had aged well cos I know some peeps be looking pon this LP as a classic....

I know im probably asking the wrong ppl but what do you guys think? (if you have heard the LP at all)

also my Jools Holland post got locked cos of someone who isnt me but it was going well man - can it be unlocked?
 

polystyle

Well-known member
Mysterons

From here , I think it has aged well .
It /they certainly did have some influence that continues .

Would have liked to hear more Portis , am curious about that Beth Gibbon record that came after Portis
 

mms

sometimes
it was a funny one that - i wasn't terribly impressed at the time esp as other amazing things were coming out of brizzle at the time like tricky and roni size and his crew, the second album that followed it and nobody bought i enjoyed alot more, ravenous anger spelt out over soundtrack funk that had the downward feeling of sabbath riffs. pure sexy evil.
it totally buried the first album for me but was way to heavy for the dinner party chill out crowd.
Apparently they are working on more stuff.
 
yup

mms said:
it was a funny one that - i wasn't terribly impressed at the time esp as other amazing things were coming out of brizzle at the time like tricky and roni size and his crew, the second album that followed it and nobody bought i enjoyed alot more, ravenous anger spelt out over soundtrack funk that had the downward feeling of sabbath riffs. pure sexy evil.
it totally buried the first album for me but was way to heavy for the dinner party chill out crowd.
Apparently they are working on more stuff.


the 2nd one is murkery....'cowboys', 'elysium' yeaaaaaaah man....I got a tape of them at glasto after it came out and man....pure power.....

they are supposed to be coming out with more stuff yeah...

I jus remembered their process of recording.....they create loops then master them, put them on a heavy weighted vinyl pressing then sample off that....v.expensive.....and slightly anal lol....
 

DigitalDjigit

Honky Tonk Woman
I only own the Live one but that one is really excellent. Timeless i would say. I think the live element is what is gonna carry it through. Simple drum loops are feeling dated already.
 

hamarplazt

100% No Soul Guaranteed
I think 'Dummy' and Portishead are responsible for some of the worst things in 90s music: the cult of all things cinematic and the fetishization of "cool"-soundtrack atmospherics. And they made a lot of rock critics able to pretend they were into electronic music and sample culture without ever investigating the really original stuff, helped to create the myth that the 90s was all about reassembling bits of the past and that no real innovation happened.

All that said, I think 'Dummy', heard out of this context, have aged quite well. It really works as a nice, integrated work, and there is some great moody moments (the second is much better at this, though), it just get a bit too much if you listen to it too often.
 

tryptych

waiting for a time
mms said:
it was a funny one that - i wasn't terribly impressed at the time esp as other amazing things were coming out of brizzle at the time like tricky and roni size and his crew, the second album that followed it and nobody bought i enjoyed alot more, ravenous anger spelt out over soundtrack funk that had the downward feeling of sabbath riffs. pure sexy evil.
it totally buried the first album for me but was way to heavy for the dinner party chill out crowd.
Apparently they are working on more stuff.


Hmm that's exactly how i felt.. Tricky seemed definately more important at the time. But later I came to appreciate it over Trickys output, and that second Portishead album is fantastic. bleak and cold...

I really like the Rustin' Man album that Beth Gibbons did with Paul Webb from Talk Talk. Definately one to check....
 

gumdrops

Well-known member
at the time, i think when someone asked tricky tricky what he hated, he said something like 'people saying i sound like fucking portishead'
 

soundslike1981

Well-known member
I got rid of this record years ago, but hearing bits lately I've thought about picking it up again from a used bin. I remembered it negatively, as mainly atmosphere and "cool," but it seems like maybe there was more thought put into it than I recognised then.
 

michael

Bring out the vacuum
I find myself wanting to hear the odd song off the first album, but don't regret selling it on. It was so completely ubiquitous once it broke that I find it hard to enjoy the music now. I also suffer flashbacks to the use of 'Rhodes' or whatever it's called in the Tank Girl movie, which I hated.

I don't like the second album. It's too cold and bleak. :D Haha. Gotta love subjectivity.
 
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michael

Bring out the vacuum
Oh yeah, I do find myself coming back to the video of 'Only You', which I've got on that Chris Cunningham DVD. Sooo good.
 

hint

party record with a siren
It's like some kind of Dissensus thread megamix:

Here's a video (.wmv) of Kanye talking about how much of an influence Dummy was.
 

dHarry

Well-known member
Dummy became a negative influence precisely because it was so good - just like Nirvana gave birth to horrendous bands like Pearl Jam, it was responsible for everything from Sneaker Pimps' pop-hop to Robbie Williams doing Bond-theme-esque stuff. But if you forget the coffee bar ubiquity and rash of 90's "female folk-soul singer does guest appearance on indietronica LP", you'll hear a truly epochal record.

Portishead are post-modern with a difference, in that they hearken back to pop and rock's romantic era (60's/70's) yet use sampling and po-mo techniques in their own striving for novelty and authenticity, recreating the nostalgic sounds of yesteryear but re-contextualising them in a unique hip hop sound-world. In this way they can be seen as an example of Deleuze and Guattari's concept of artistic becoming, where the styles of the past are recreated but become different, are set free from their original context to reveal different forces, at the same time as their own sound is transformed by this curious fidelity to the sounds of the past.

Geoff Barrow freely admits in (rare) interviews that he hasn't seen the films he's sampled, has never listened to the jazz or avant-classical he's supposed to be influenced by, is cripplingly media-shy and sincere (he actually apologised to one interviewer for owning the house he bought on the album sales), and obviously had no idea that his creation would become (briefly) massively trendy. He is as obsessive as Kevin Shields, recording his own sounds live with dogged fidelity to recording techniques of the 60's/70's, then digitally processing them, pressing them to vinyl and re-recording them from turntables weighted down for extra crackle, hum, weight, gravity and pressure, allying these slo-mo soporific atmospherics with an irrational love of hip hop and cinematic sound.

Beth Gibbon similarly rarely did press interviews, caring so little for acclaim that she drunkenly swapped her Mercury statue for a fag after the awards. But she is a virtuoso of vocal style, refusing an authentic "personal" voice in favour of inhabiting different styles, often within a single song. Glory Box for example begins with that famous Eartha Kitt vampire routine then switching abruptly into open-throated soul diva for the chorus. It's this stylistic overload that allows her and us to revel in either the over-blown emotions of tracks like this, or the grain and sound of the voice, without the pressure of believing in an emoting ego behind it. And then from nowhere they detonate their most commercial single with that depth-charge breakbeat-from-hell in place of a middle 8, with Gibbon's distorted wailing tape-echoed over it - one of the more thrilling moments of pop terrorism in recent memory, up there with 'ardcore's anschluss on the charts a few years previously.

The second studio album was the same only more so, the darkness darker, the distortion rougher, the voice more cracked and ravaged, culminating in Half-Day Closing which combines Black Sabbath/King Crimson-esque dynamics with Beth shrieking of the evils of capitalism (I think - "Underneath the fading sun/the silent scheme of a businessman/has left us choking/Dreams/can't believe they've gone") through a distorted Hammond organ Leslie speaker, as if underwater or from another planet.

Kanye West isn't the only hip hop artist to cite them as an influence - one of those Wu-Tang offshoots (Bobby Digital I think) sampled them, and Timbaland has cited their sound/production as an influence (he possibly sampled them somewhere also?). After a Shields-esque lull since there last album who knows what they will sound like next, or what the world will make of it, but in a music-scape devoid of singular acts following a vision I reckon we need them more than ever (Ladytron and maybe Stereo Total are the only other "bands" that I can get excited about; in the post-rave discontinuum it's more about scenes/genres).
 

petergunn

plywood violin
dHarry said:
Dummy became a negative influence precisely because it was so good - just like Nirvana gave birth to horrendous bands like Pearl Jam, it was responsible for everything from Sneaker Pimps' pop-hop to Robbie Williams doing Bond-theme-esque stuff. But if you forget the coffee bar ubiquity and rash of 90's "female folk-soul singer does guest appearance on indietronica LP", you'll hear a truly epochal record.

i was right about to post that... the only reason Portishead haven't aged well, is like Nirvana, they came up with a relatively easy style to mimic and water down, and so their style has been destroyed to the point that i think of "trip hop" as a bad thing... every retarded rock band heard that portishead record (and lists them as influences on their "bassist wanted!" flyers) and now puts a hip hop drumbeat on every ballad they write...





Kanye West isn't the only hip hop artist to cite them as an influence - one of those Wu-Tang offshoots (Bobby Digital I think) sampled them, and Timbaland has cited their sound/production as an influence (he possibly sampled them somewhere also?). the post-rave discontinuum it's more about scenes/genres).

yes, rza sampled Portishead on the Bobby Digital LP...
 

bassnation

the abyss
hamarplazt said:
I think 'Dummy' and Portishead are responsible for some of the worst things in 90s music: the cult of all things cinematic and the fetishization of "cool"-soundtrack atmospherics. And they made a lot of rock critics able to pretend they were into electronic music and sample culture without ever investigating the really original stuff, helped to create the myth that the 90s was all about reassembling bits of the past and that no real innovation happened.

i don't think any of this is really true. some great music is cinematic and if you want to point the finger you should be looking at lps like the blade runner soundtrack by vangelis which everyone in the nineties dance scene was into. its fashionable for people to pretend they were never into some of the more popular nineties dance music like portishead - but not me. i loved it and i couldn't care less if its unfashionable now.

and just because some people played it at dinner parties doesn't mean dummy isn't a good album. not willing to assess things on that basis, its what it sounds like to me that counts. iirc theres some dark tunes on there. thinking of that one with the pitched down vocal chorus ("never fall in love again"?). heavy. in fact i remember the lp doing my head in sometimes coming down after raving.
 
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mms

sometimes
this thread makes me want to start a thread about tricky which i've been thinking about for ages but there is too much to say about the guy.
 

hamarplazt

100% No Soul Guaranteed
bassnation said:
i don't think any of this is really true. some great music is cinematic and if you want to point the finger you should be looking at lps like the blade runner soundtrack by vangelis which everyone in the nineties dance scene was into. its fashionable for people to pretend they were never into some of the more popular nineties dance music like portishead - but not me. i loved it and i couldn't care less if its unfashionable now.
Never actually loved it, but I did like it back then and I still do. As I wrote.

And yes, some cinematic music is great, but 90s cinematic-by-numbers music isn't.
 

bassnation

the abyss
hamarplazt said:
Never actually loved it, but I did like it back then and I still do. As I wrote.

And yes, some cinematic music is great, but 90s cinematic-by-numbers music isn't.

well, i suppose if we're talking about soporific bossa nova drivel like theivery corporation i could agree with you. but they were hardly in the same league as portishead. funnily enough i remember despising a lot of trip hop in the nineties but i'm coming to look on it more kindly with the passage of time, not less. even gave the mo wax headz album a listen the other day.
 
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