Portishead prove their no dummy
Dummy reviewed

By JOHN SAKAMOTO
Toronto Sun

DUMMY
Portishead
(Go Beat/PolyGram 828 553 2)

Proclaimed the best album of 1994 by influential U.K. music weekly Melody Maker which, in typically arm-waving fashion described it as "Billie Holiday reincarnated and brought into the Nineties." Well, no. Moody, spare and undeniably intimate, it stands out from the rest of the British indie-rock scene simply because it's so atypical.

But atypical and exceptional are two entirely different things, and Dummy seems content to settle for the former. Undeniably seductive in small doses, it is numbingly repetitive in anything beyond that.

And that's something Billie Holiday could never be accused of.