Dummy [VINYL]

Product Information

All tracks recorded at State of Art and Coach House Studios, Bristol, with additional mixing at Moles Studio, Bath. Where most of the decade’s cutting-edge electronic music was zealous about its agenda, Dummy pledged allegiance only to a mood. Without a public persona to measure Gibbons’ performance against, her presence within the songs was, and remains, that much more formidable. The galumphing rhythm feels like a heavy burlap bag being dragged over railroad ties, but Gibbons’ voice—a home-recorded demo that made the final edit—is a slender thread pulled taut.

Not quite a band, hardly a strictly electronic project, they had to invent their own kind of virtuosity, one that encompassed musicianship, technology, and aura. Web icon An illustration of a computer application window Wayback Machine Texts icon An illustration of an open book.Images Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape Donate Ellipses icon An illustration of text ellipses. In the closing “Glory Box,” on the other hand, she is as incendiary as Utley’s overdriven guitar riffs, and when she sings, “This is the beginning/Of forever and ever, oh,” her sigh feels like a hole torn in the fabric of the universe. I’m not normally fussed about format as long as the end product sounds good, but this one feels right on record.

Some lines stand out as clearly as dog-eared diary entries: “Give me a reason to love you/Give me a reason to be a woman”; “Nobody loves me, it’s true/Not like you do”; “How can it feel this wrong? I have many albums that have recorded sibilance and none of them sound nowhere near as bad played through my system, the eSSses are faithfully reproduced, on this pressing though it is so bad that it sounds like HF distortion. Track after track, the album toggles between crisp steppers and deadweight friction, between ping-ponging ricochets and Sisyphus’ last stand. Meanwhile, back in February, band member Adrian Utley told The Quietus that Portishead had finally started work on a new album, their fourth overall and first since 2008’s Third. Of course it is; you don’t evoke ’60s spy flicks without some deep-seated feelings about aesthetics, panache, the proper cut of a suit.Its obsessions are too specific, and too doggedly pursued: the spy-movie twang of the guitars, the ripple of the Hammond organs and Leslie cabinets—if anything, its vintage signifiers feel out of step with that era’s rush of pre-millennium tension. B4 samples Johnnie Ray from " I'll Never Fall In Love Again" courtesy of Carlyle Music Publishing/Sony Music Entertainment Inc. Utley’s riffs come straight from John Barry’s James Bond theme; the woozy sine waves of “Mysterons” echo sci-fi soundtracks like The Day the Earth Stood Still; and “Sour Times” loops an extended sample of Lalo Schifrin’s music for Mission: Impossible. Over its 40 years in business, PIAS has grown to be one of the largest independently-owned music groups in the world, carving out its own in-house recorded music division PIAS [Recordings]. More recent issues seemed much cheaper with cover and all and I wonder if they are really still being pressed at Pallas, so I went with this.

until you play it on a very revealing system and notice that pretty much each song is plagued by sibilance. But this pressing really throws it in my face, and its hard to enjoy the music once you've heard it once. Once they had their songs engineered on 24-track tape, they’d take the final product and feed it back into their samplers; some material they even pressed onto vinyl dubplates, to manipulate the way a hip-hop producer would cut up breakbeats. Over the last few months he has disarmed packed rooms of rowdy concert goers, leaving them silent as they hold fast to every syllable sung. Can see this is the predominant reporting on this product, and I see far too many complaints about sibilance, suggesting the "blame" rides solely on the vinyl manufacturer, mastering process, etc.Dummy arrived at a moment when young people were craving soundtracks for the comedown—but what happens when you follow Portishead all the way down, as far as they want to take us? Dummy' helped synthesize a new sound that became essential to the Bristol scene, coinciding with bands such as Massive Attack to put West Country trip-hop on the map. Gibbons’ voice is the center of the music; she elevates the recordings from tracks to songs, from mere head-nodders to forlorn lullabies. None of Portishead’s imitators understood that it’s not the blue notes or the mood lighting that make it tick—it’s the pockets of emptiness inside. In “Mysterons,” the looped snare rolls sound like a steel trap snapping shut and being pried back open in quick succession.