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© 1998-2003, |
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Music
Cool Groups
 | Underworld |
| Talvin Singh |
| Portishead |
| Propellerheads |
| Fatboy Slim |
| Chemical Brothers |
Portishead
The Noir Sound Of Portishead
There are certain songs -- whole albums,
sometimes -- which slowly, but surely, get
under your skin and take hold of your very
being. Sometimes, it's as if a new
personality invades your consciousness, and,
for a while at least, changes your
perspective.
Such was the case with "Sour
Times," Portishead's breakthrough 1994
single, as well as the group's entire debut
album, Dummy. Back then, critics swooned to
Beth Gibbons' dreamy vocals and Geoff
Barrow's homemade sampling brews. It took
two years for the quartet -- which also
includes guitarist Adrian Utley and
musician/engineer Dave McDonald -- to craft
a follow-up.
Portishead is a plaintive, disturbing and
refreshingly honest album that builds on the
sound that made their first record such a
revelation.
It was worth the wait. Just a few listens
and you can already feel the sounds
permeating your very soul.
Portishead's return should more than satisfy
fans of the band's drowsy, noir melancholia.
Although in an early 1995 Dummy-era
interview with Addicted to Noise, Barrow
predicted Portishead's music would take a
new direction, Portishead is a plaintive,
disturbing and refreshingly honest album
that builds on the sound that made their
first record such a revelation.
"Cowboys," the opening track, with
its siren-like reverberations breaking loose
as Gibbons' disconnected voice enters the
scene, immediately establishes that
Portishead is going to take you to somewhere
else. A record-pop loop recalls an older
time, a sepia-toned history with elements of
1940s jazz, while Gibbons, in razor blade
tones, warns: "But don't despair, this
day will be the damnedest day/ If you take
these things from me."
Much of the record borrows its ambiance from
pre-rock musical constructions; It's the
kind of music which might have been made for
black and white films, if samplers had
existed in the 1930s.
Several tracks make liberal use of fuzzy
record crackles, layered with a favorite
Barrow ploy: old-school scratching by way of
American hip-hop, an effect which brings
tension to numbers such as "Over,"
"Only You" and
"Elysium." However, while hip-hop
artists use the scratch as a beat-building
mechanism, Barrow creates off-rhythm layers
which manipulate the mood of Portishead's
compositions.
The undeniable draw of the band is Gibbons'
voice. Through often tiny effects a la
Billie Holiday, she displays a range of
emotions, from the near-sobbing tremble of
"Undenied," where she asks,
"Now that I've found you/ And seen
behind those eyes/ How can I carry on?"
to cold fury in songs such as
"Elysium" and "Seven
Months," where she sings, "Why
should I forgive you after all that I've
seen?/ Quietly whisper when my heart wants
to scream?"
Gibbons' shows us her sultry side to carry a
jazzy melody in the first single, "All
Mine." At first the track seems like an
unabashed love song, with big-band horns
punctuating Gibbons' croon. "But when
you smile, oh how I feel so good/ That I can
hardly wait to hold you and fold you/ Never
enough, render your heart to me/ All
mine." It's so genuine that the
listener can't help but suspect a darker
truth, which Gibbons renders in the next
verse: "Make no mistake, you shan't
escape/ Tendered and tied, there's nowhere
to hide from me/ All mine." She also
puts on her best Billie Holiday for
"Western Eyes." When she trills
lines such as, "Yes, I'm breaking at
the seams, just like you," there's no
doubting her sincerity.
Other touches that flesh out Portishead's
unusual sonic atmosphere: Guitarist Adrian
Utley's 007 guitar lines on "Seven
Months" and "Mourning Air,"
along with sampled trumpets, strings and
various eerie noises.
Perhaps the most unique-sounding track,
however, is "Half Day Closing," a
psychedelic explosion of dissonance and
sorrow. Gibbons' voice is treated with
warbled Leslie effects while electronic
scales build behind her, creating a
space-age undercurrent that suggests
disconnectedness. In a telling line Gibbons
sings, "In the olden days when
everybody knew what they wanted -- it ain't
today."
Portishead's music at once seems to invoke
the past -- some hazy period between the
smoky jazz clubs of the 1930s and the noir
films of the 1940s and 1950s -- and a
futuristic landscape laid flat by despair.
Tension builds between Gibbons' sweet, sadly
delivered melodies and Barrow's dissonant
rhythms and scraps of noise.
With their new album, Portishead indicates
that there are still vast sonic landscapes
to explore. And this is just the beginning.
Propellerheads
Faster!Faster!Faster!
The title alone tells you much of what
you need to know about this album -- that
it's a noisy, chaotic amalgam of DJ culture,
live beats and good old-fashioned guitars.
In Propellerheads' British homeland, this
type of combination has livened up a scene
where techno "trainspotters" were
becoming increasingly anal in their overly
serious pursuit of purity, and where "indie"
rockers were denying the existence of any
decade since the 1960s. For those who enjoy
a little of everything -- and who enjoy the
process of enjoying it -- the new,
beer-and-amphetamine-fueled "big
beat" sound of Propellerheads, Fatboy
Slim, Bentley Rhythm Ace and others has been
a godsend. Rock 'n' roll is suddenly fun
again. Dance music is fun again. Even
better, they appear to be one and the same
thing.
"Less expected, perhaps, are the two
new tracks added since the U.K. release
earlier this year."
But although their approach to musicmaking
might appear drunk and disorderly, the
figureheads behind Propellerheads know
precisely what they're doing. As well they
should, given their credentials. Alex
Gifford is a 34-year-old journeyman who has
played piano for Van Morrison, played
saxophone for The Stranglers, played synths
for The Grid and engineered for Peter
Gabriel. Twentysomething Will White, the son
of a respected jazz drummer, is a sticksman
of the highest order, has played in an
acid-jazz/hip-hop band and worked as a DJ.
The two, who reside in the quiet, old
university town of Bath, have thrown all
their experience into the Propellerheads
project, but just as important, they've
thrown in all their enthusiasm, too. Gifford
will tell you this is the first time he has
truly, thoroughly enjoyed the musicmaking
process.
Perhaps it's just coincidence, then, that
they should be doing so well with something
they so love. But certainly Gifford and
White could not have chosen a better climate
in which to indulge their love of spy
themes: the lounge scene has revived
interest in soundtracks and the supposedly
finer accoutrements of life -- things like
cocktails and sharp suits -- while big beat
is naturally cinematic, with its sudden
stabs of melodramatic melody over big, bold
drums and epic breakdowns. These genres meet
time and again on DECKSANDRUMSANDROCKANDROLL
-- from Propellerheads' early single and
high-octane album-opener "Take
California," which still sounds like a
battle scene to save the planet, through to
their three U.K. singles from last year: the
self- descriptive "Spybreak,"
since used for a car chase in the David
Duchovny film "Playing God"; the
jazzy and brash "History
Repeating," with the great Bond theme
veteran Shirley Bassey on vocals; and their
masterful reworking of the "007"
soundtrack, "On Her Majesty's Secret
Service," which producer David Arnold
also featured on his recent Shaken And
Stirred tribute.
If these tracks appear overly dramatic and
foreboding, don't worry: the humor of big
beat culture is clearly evident elsewhere.
"Velvet Pants" features a speech
from a documentary on groupies, "Number
of Microphones" stars Will White as a
human beatbox, and "Bigger"
matches its subject matter with suitably
phat keyboard lines. While some of the vocal
samples are almost juvenile in their wit,
the music itself never suffers. Sure, it
puts a smile on the face, even makes you
giggle, but why shouldn't a predominantly
instrumental form of music tickle your funny
bone as well as shake your ass?
Less expected, perhaps, are the two new
tracks added since the U.K. release earlier
this year. "360 Degrees" is a
reworking of an instrumental "Oh
Yeah" -- but with De La Soul on vocals
-- while the finale, "You Want It
Back," is uptempo hip-hop starring the
Jungle Brothers. Both are functional and
will serve them well with American post-rave
headz. But the Propellerheads' most likely
audience will still be the alt-rock,
frat-boy crowd that has adopted the Chemical
Brothers and Prodigy en masse. For them,
this is an album made in block-rockin'
heaven -- with the panache and wit of
classic James Bond.
Fatboy
Slim
Check
It Out Now -- The Funk Soul Brother
Norman Cook used to be the bassist for
the Housemartins, but you'd never know it
from the wild dance floor cut-ups he's been
doing for the last ten years or so --
initially as Beats International (remember
their Clash/S.O.S. Band hybrid "Dub Be
Good To Me"?), later as a series of
one-off names he took for fun little singles
("Real Sounds Of Africa," "Pizzaman"
and the like, mostly collected on the
Southern Fried House compilation) and most
recently as Fatboy Slim. Slim's modus
operandi is pretty stable: find a couple of
out-of-the-way samples that go together
nicely and make them dirty-dance together
until they hit it off, using the
repeat-and-truncate patterns that Todd Terry
pioneered for dance music. "The
Rockafeller Skank," the leadoff single
from MTV's Amp 2 compilation, has been
catching on with modern-rock stations, and
this four-track EP (including two versions
of "Rockafeller" and two lesser
jams) has appeared to fill the void for
Fatboy product.
The stroke of genius is a nod to the late
'80s electro classic "French
Kiss."
"Rockafeller" is Cook's most
indelible piece in ages, more or less by
sheer luck. It's a snippet of hip-hop speak
("Right about now -- the funk soul
brother"), a bit of what sounds like
Duane Eddy lead guitar, a couple of
measures' worth of a disco-rock riff and not
much else, arranged in a variety of
positions worthy of the Kama Sutra. The
stroke of genius, though, is a nod to the
late '80s electro classic "French
Kiss." The track suddenly shudders to a
halt halfway through, starts up again as a
slow pounder, then accelerates to its
initial sprint -- a sort of "Come On
Eileen" for a digital, post-verbal,
post-melody time.
As for the other two tracks, "Always
Read The Label" is an old-school
hip-hop loop prettied up with those
four-on-the-floor edits for six minutes, and
the drumless instrumental "Tweakers
Delight" recalls the early days of acid
house, when all you really needed was a 303
pattern (a 303 was a synth/drum machine that
was used on a lot of early acid house
records) and a flanger (a sound-altering
device that changes the tone but not the
pitch of a series of notes) to make a mark
on the E'd-out crowds.