It's a dividing line in its own way. Blue Lines is and remains something very special, but Dummy is what got everyone talking about it, and what everyone after it has to refer to or had referred to by others.
'It' of course is --*ahem*-- 'trip-hop,' about which likely you've doubtless heard. Emerging in weird sync with the lounge/exotica revival, positioned somewhere alongside Britpop in the UK and benefitting from an unexpected radio hit status in the States due to "Sour Times," the apparent elements were so obvious that it just took a year or two before a bunch of idiot no-marks doing bad nightclub jazz starting passing themselves off as the same, reducing the whole thing to one of the worst possible yupscum exercises out there. Dummy just sits there in history now, regarding the whole thing with a rheumy, bemused eye, maybe.
As I said at semi-length in my review of the self-titled second album, the reason it all works is because turntable guy Geoff Barrow is distinctly not interested in doing bad nightclub jazz. He's a hip-hop fiend, and to quote a review from the shamefully forgotten Neil Kulkarni around that time, hip-hop is a trip. That's the whole point! Which is why what works about a song like "Strangers" is how the beat is huge, then shifts to a scratchy from-two-doors over bit of Beth Gibbons singing straight, a couple of echoed noises, and then it all recombines clearly, stitched together, before slipping in the weird strings and bells before banishing them entirely. You're not supposed to get surprised over something like this per se if you know anything about modern music, but clearly a lot of people still thought sampling and mixing was a fad. The hell?
But the surprise is more in the sources, really, and if somebody had been creating a smoky, John Barry sixties spy movie soundscape record as rooted in spinning Jeru the Damaja (as Barrow did, among many other things old and now, in the DJ set he did before the Portishead show I saw in 1995) as anything else in the universe before this record, then it's about time it got attention as well. Or maybe like those bad versions of the Hamlet story and all before Shakespeare came along, it needed the right touch to make it work. Gibbons is the most traditional thing on here, of course, but it makes you realize how the combination of something so apparently un-hip (singing Janis Joplin covers in local bands, things like that) with the right sense of what you can do nowadays means you have the secret weapon when you spring things on a supposedly jaded audience.
Of course, the acid jazz freaks thought Dummy meant vindication for their sorry art, except then they realized that meant they would have to start dealing with all those drum machines and scratches and things made after 1977. So they helped make Paul Weller famous again instead, which is why they should be shot like dogs. They couldn't understand why the theremin noises worked so well in "Mysterons" or why the synth string start for "It's a Fire" beats out most of Anne Dudley's various arrangements over the years or why "Glory Box" needs that last "and EVEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEER!" followed by the percussion bomb being dropped just so.
While it's not as freaked out and fucked up as Portishead proved to be in the end, suggesting shadows rather than staking out victims, and while millions of babies were relentlessly unborn as smoothies with leather couches had healthily enjoyable safe sex with wannabe junior execs when it came on the 100-CD changer after the Barry White disc ended, forever linking it with fashion mags and bad TV shows, Dummy remains the great slice of art it is. C'mon, you can't knock sampling Johnny Ray as if he's about to collapse. That takes talent.