Portishead’s ‘Dummy’ Is 25. The Band Asks That You Play It Loud.

In the summer of 1994, when American alternative rock kids were kicking up mud to Nine Inch Nails and Green Day, “Dummy,” the debut album from the Bristol, U.K.-based group Portishead, rolled in like a moody fog.

While it was rooted in the hip-hop production techniques of sampling, scratching, crate-digging and loop-making, “Dummy” was a different mélange of vintage touchstones. The producer Geoff Barrow sampled a spy soundtrack by the polymath Lalo Schifrin; the guitarist Adrian Utley provided twangy counterpoint reminiscent of an Ennio Morricone score; and the singer Beth Gibbons crooned delicate, unsettling poetry fragments like torch songs. (The studio project’s lineup was rounded out by the engineer Dave McDonald.)

A quick and unexpected success, “Dummy” scored a Billboard Hot 100 single and MTV hit (“Sour Times”), was awarded the Mercury Music Prize and ultimately spawned a slew of imitators. The group became one of a handful associated with the sound writers called “trip-hop,” alongside Massive Attack and Tricky, acts that melded methodically slow breakbeats with murky atmospheres and floating melody. In a meta twist, “Dummy” itself became prime sample material for many ’90s rap producers, including Timbaland, Souls of Mischief’s Opio and the Arsonists’ Q-Unique. Its influence lives on today in the stylized vintage of Lana Del Rey and the murky beats of SoundCloud rap.

Portishead released a second album in 1997, then went on hiatus for a decade, returning in 2008 with “Third.” Today, Barrow drums for the brittle post-punk trio Beak> and is an in-demand soundtrack composer, while Utley is a session guitarist and releases music with his Guitar Orchestra and Gibbons can be heard on a version of Henryk Gorecki’s Symphony No. 3, recorded with the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra.

Source: The New York Times

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