Peter Murphy was right all along. About the only goth band worth talking about in the nineties, Portishead, and this was the album that cinched it.
The running argument is that in fact Portishead was little more than Dummy redux, but the running argument can take a flying one. All it takes is a listen to "Cowboys," the first track, and while yeah, it sounds like Portishead -- Beth Gibbons' alien blues, Geoff Barrow's still-underrated scratching and Adrian Utley's ability to coordinate it all together -- they never sounded so out for somebody's soul, as in forcibly removing it from the mortal coil it would be contained in. A friend of mine said that he could imagine the video for this featuring Gibbons stalking a blasted urban landscape with blood on her lips and malevolence everywhere, and when the wordless choir suddenly backs her and Barrow solely, it all makes a very evil sense. Then "All Mine" beats "This is Hardcore" to the post-John Barry horn punch game, only even more perversely cold and warm at the same time, and when Gibbons asks, "Render your heart to me," for some reason the love in her heart sounds like it would just as soon tear you apart if you even think of doing her slightly wrong. Even the snaky guitar line at the break works like that -- scalpel sharp? You betcha.
It continues like that throughout, really. Portishead already unexpectedly won over the yup shag scum with Dummy, so my thought has always been they decided to make an album which you couldn't as easily turn the lights down low to and start making the moves. Everything is pitched a little more aggressively, the rougher edges and sudden trebles are all that much more nagging. Even something as apparently smooth as "Undenied" suddenly collapses under the beat, vinyl scratchiness finally removed as a signifier of reality and used explicitly as dynamics as much as whatever drum loop was liberated and reused. The crunches and fills and buried shouts and more beneath the gentle guitar on "Over" further the destabilization just that much more; an organic effect that actually calls to mind how reassembled everything is for maximum emotive slams.
Is it any wonder that Barrow is a hip-hop fiend and that he works from this angle while so many of the ripoff bands simply do bad jazz blues with samples? The distinction is important and clear here, since the one destroys in order to create while the other fetishizes, and then what is the point? When the strings slide out from the background again and again on "Humming," the monster movie cliché becomes a growing sense of total creepout. Something is going to happen…but what? And don't get me going about how the beginning of "Seven Months" is arranged to always cause the hairs on my neck to stand up. When Gibbons asks "Why should I forgive you?" in context it's a damn good question, because it sounds like the wrong answer will be the last one as well.
Bristol may indeed have been the most overly fetishized place in the UK for the course of the decade, if only because Camden was always regarded as hype where Bristol stood for 'quality,' all of an ominous sort. Sure, the joke may have gotten old somewhere along the line. But Portishead were never joking. When I saw the most recent of their amazingly energetic and powerful live shows, the film image behind "Cowboys" was nothing but a series of Technics turntable shots, lit so to make everything look very, very wrong. Quite so, indeed.