Unlike anything else you'll hear this year
Portishead reviewed

By DAVE VEITCH
Calgary Sun

PORTISHEAD
Portishead
(Go Beat/PolyGram 539 189 2)

Portishead's debut album Dummy introduced trip-hop to the mainstream and created a new musical vocabulary for other artists, among them Rickie Lee Jones and Lori Yates, who admitted the album inspired their own trip-hop-flavored new discs.

The mainstream will have to play catch-up again, as the Bristol quartet transcends trip-hop and has invented down-and-out blues for the 21st century with their second album.

On the surface, Portishead isn't a dramatic departure from Dummy: There's noirish atmosphere; jazzy textures; lyrics that span the emotional range from gloomy to gruesome; and languid rhythm tracks, as if sampled from a scratchy 78 RPM record played at 33 RPM. But the new songs are more fully formed and richer than anything on Dummy and singer Beth Gibbons' performance is astounding: Hearing her distorted vocals crack on Half Day Closing is to witness melancholy harden into depression and fester into a nervous breakdown right before your ears.

In the end, the band's sophomore album has more in common with the staggering, emotive blues of Billie Holiday and the heartbreaking soul of Roberta Flack than any current musical movement.

This soundtrack to a bleak, late-night world is unsettling but gripping -- and unlike anything else you'll hear this year.