Q Magazine

Portishead
Dummy

4 stars

Portishead is a small town outside of Bristol and home to singer Beth Gibbons and musician Geoff Barrow, the shakermakers behind perhaps the year's most stunning debut album. The current single, Sour Times, is the best indicator, a gorgeously blue lament set to a loping hip hop beat with a shimmering, cinematic arrangement of dark guitar twang and jangling dulcimer. The result most closely echoes the drama of Unfinished Sympathy by fellow Bristolians Massive Attack. Strangers, Numb and It Could Be Sweet nail an atmosphere of romantic abandonment and urban alienation that reaches its apothesis in the closing Glory Box, where a mournful guitar solo precedes Gibbons's panicky realisation: "If this is the beginning of forever and ever . . ." The singer's frail, wounded-sparrow vocals and Barrow's mastery of jazz-sensitive soul/hip hop grooves and the almost forgotten art of scratching are an enthralling combination, and if Portishead tend to dwell within the same groove, it's easy to forgive them when they're on to such a good thing.

Reviewed by Martin Aston