I thought it was a cohesive seamless (skunk) trip of an album. Its spangly digital clean-ness turned out to be a virtue (a la Luomo), providing an unlikely context for some gritty rapping by 3D and Tricky, great vocals by Nicolette, Tracey and Horace and some fantastic slo-mo 303 action. And the live Light My Fire (sound system stylee) at the end works as a nod to their roots and a wake-up bump back to reality at the end.Yeah, protection seemed a bit directionless, although it contains some great individual moments, perhaps more of an EP than an album...
Mezzanine for me was over-long, turgid and boring, only RisingSon, Angel and the Liz Frazer track really work, Inertia Creeps says it all for the rest; even the other female vocal track sounds like token trip hop.
But it always puzzled me how Portishead could be considered in the same league as dreck like Morcheeba, Sneaker Pimps et al. Geoff Barrow is a sonic architect with serious next-level hip hop and production skills, and Beth Gibbon is an incredible singer and songwriter, a virtuoso of stylistic tics (a refusal of a coherent expressive ego?) and sheer power. The atmosphere, grain and weight/drag of their sound is addictive. Amazingly they pull the whole thing off live as a band incredibly well also, after prime late 80's Sonic Youth and MBV, one of the most impressive gigs I've seen. Their contribution to a recent Serge Gainsbourg tribute was worryingly dull and rockist, hopefully they haven't abandoned their retro-future hip hop experiments and Geoff will listen to some dub-step instead of Hendrix before the next album gets made. Their first three singles had some incredible Barrow remixes, and his GB Beats track opening the Andy Smith mix Document LP is fantastic, not far off filthy dub-step in its way.