Word: portishead
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...than the past. The years ahead seem populated with clones and robots and aliens, as well as the erosion or perversion of the things that connect people with other people, like families and friendships and religion. Perhaps the best thing about the music of the British trip-hop group Portishead, and the Icelandic pop diva Bjork, is that it sounds futuristic but never inhuman. Portishead's new album, Portishead, and Bjork's latest CD, Homogenic, echo with sounds that could belong to the next millennium. But both are also suffused with a soulfulness that is timeless...
...Portishead's groundbreaking debut album, Dummy (1994), along with producer-rapper Tricky's Maxinquaye (1995), helped define the nascent genre of trip-hop, an arty European variant of hip-hop characterized by dreamy lyrics and lounging, lulling song structures. Portishead is another stellar work. While Dummy's sound was sweetened with recognizable melodic flavors drawn from R. and B. and gospel, the new album is stranger, more unsettling, more sour. Vocalist Beth Gibbons' voice is distorted on many of the tracks, stretched thin and left floating high and parched over shards of melody and jagged bits of rhythm. One song...
Bjork's voice, like Gibbons' on Portishead's CD, unifies and personalizes her album. Bjork shrieks and moans and hits strong, fresh notes, or does whatever is required to convey the emotions raging inside her. The seeming spontaneity of her performance is what's exciting. In the video for Joga, the first single from Homogenic, we see computer-generated images of landmasses, as if from a great height, and then Bjork herself, standing on a high hill, a gap in her chest exposing her swirling insides. The camera plunges within. In a future world of computer images, what still attracts...
...electro atmospherics; Carl Craig's More Songs about Food and Revolutionary Art (Planet E) is puckishly inventive; and The Rebirth of Cool FOUR (4th & Broadway) is an excellent compilation of electro acts. Later this year new CDs are due from two of the best electro acts, Goldie and Portishead...
...band like Nirvana--or the Sex Pistols before them--comes around and changes everything. Now the hunt is definitely on for the next Next Big Thing. Ska is a candidate, with groups like No Doubt racking up sales. Trip-hop is another contender, with performers such as Tricky and Portishead. There are also electronic-dance-music forms like Jungle. "We see 1997 as a time of exploration in the music biz," says MTV's Schuon. Explains Lisa Cortes, former president of Loose Cannon Records: "People are hungry for different stories." While alternative rock tended to be mostly white, the newer...