Source: TIME, October 20, 1997

THE ARTS/MUSIC: SONGS FROM TOMORROW FUTURISTIC POP BY SINGER BJORK AND TRIP-HOP BAND
PORTISHEAD

We often tend to imagine the future as something less human than the past. The years ahead seem populated with clones and
robots and aliens, as well as the erosion or perversion of the things that connect people with other people, like families and
friendships and religion. Perhaps the best thing about the music of the British trip-hop group Portishead, and the Icelandic pop
diva Bjork, is that it sounds futuristic but never inhuman. Portishead's new album, Portishead, and Bjork's latest CD,
Homogenic, echo with sounds that could belong to the next millennium. But both are also suffused with a soulfulness that is
timeless.

Portishead's groundbreaking debut album, Dummy (1994), along with producer-rapper Tricky's Maxinquaye (1995), helped
define the nascent genre of trip-hop, an arty European variant of hip-hop characterized by dreamy lyrics and lounging, lulling
song structures. Portishead is another stellar work. While Dummy's sound was sweetened with recognizable melodic flavors
drawn from R. and B. and gospel, the new album is stranger, more unsettling, more sour. Vocalist Beth Gibbons' voice is
distorted on many of the tracks, stretched thin and left floating high and parched over shards of melody and jagged bits of
rhythm. One song, All Mine, has a sound that might be described as big-band noir, with blaring horns and desperate, almost
manic vocals. Another, Half Day Closing, ends with Gibbons' eerie wail twisting wraithlike into the ether. And Humming opens
with a portentous Moog-synthesizer solo that seems borrowed, in mood, from a '50s sci-fi film. The songs on Portishead have
one unifying feature: they all seem constructed on a wasteland of despair. Producer-songwriter Geoff Barrow, who, along with
Gibbons, forms the core of Portishead, says simply, "I'm not a very optimistic person, really."

Bjork's work, in contrast, has been characterized by an insistent sprightliness. Yet that upbeat temperament should not be
mistaken for shallowness or lack of guile. Throughout Homogenic, there is a current of danger and violence. On the driving
Bachelorette, Bjork sings, "I'm a fountain of blood, my love/ In the shape of a girl." And on the high-voltage, techno-infused
Pluto, she sings, "Excuse me/ but I just have to explode." The album's sound is a collision of classical style (violins and cellos)
and bruising electronic beats.

Bjork's voice, like Gibbons' on Portishead's CD, unifies and personalizes her album. Bjork shrieks and moans and hits strong,
fresh notes, or does whatever is required to convey the emotions raging inside her. The seeming spontaneity of her performance
is what's exciting. In the video for Joga, the first single from Homogenic, we see computer-generated images of landmasses, as
if from a great height, and then Bjork herself, standing on a high hill, a gap in her chest exposing her swirling insides. The camera
plunges within. In a future world of computer images, what still attracts us is the heart.

By: CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY