by Sarah Vowell
A few months ago, in between apartments, in between cities, I found myself camping out on a friend's couch for a spell. I liked her neighborhood, her living room, her company. All there was to spoil our idyll was one daily annoyance creeping down through the ceiling: the theremin alarm clock. Portishead was like coffee to the upstairs neighbor. She couldn't wake up without a cranked run through Dummy. From the theremin-flecked first song, it moves posthaste to the wonderfully pathetic "Sour Times," and every time singer Beth Gibbons would wail, "Nobody loves me," we'd yell at the ceiling, "Maybe if you owned another goddamn record they would!" These days, though I appreciate listening to the album when I choose, I almost miss hearing it pour through the walls. Almost. Because Portishead doesn't so much sound as seep.
When I told another friend the band was releasing a new record she said, "Good! Then maybe people will stop playing the old one!" If white pop music in the '90s has designated a Switzerland, a neutral ground where all fringe elements can peacefully, if not always enthusiastically, coexist, then that 1994 album might be it. Dance enthusiasts got off on its droning, transatlantic drum-machine beats and sample-enhanced grooves; loungy types got reworked spy movie riffs and, in the voice of Gibbons, an icy torch singer who sounds like a Bond girl with a mike; close-minded rockers like me appreciated the effectiveness of good old-fashioned beginning-middle-end song structure; it even gained a following among alternacountry depressives, who dug the gloom-and-doom lyrics. And if there's a more universally understood catchphrase than "Nobody loves me," please inform either Merle Haggard or Alanis Morissette.
On their lovely eponymous new one, Portishead sound as clammy and glammy as ever, moping along the same old world-weary path. Which is no bad thing: superimposing Gibbons's downcast moans onto Geoff Barrow's urbane Eurokeyboards and record-scratching soundscapes worked then, as now. Some folks call this genre "trip hop." Me, I just call it blues.
They do the same song over and over and they do it really, really well. A typical Portishead cut might be "Only You," in which a dreamy, synthy background gives way to playful little froglike scratches (I'm hearing "ribbet"), setting the stage for a patented Gibbons pick-me-up like "We suffer everyday," leading to a perky, puppy-love chorus about how "Only you can tear me apart." You were expecting maybe Hanson?
What's new about Portishead--and it's subtle--is a kind of clamor that was missing in Dummy. Where Dummy was all heartache, Portishead has a lot of bellyaching in it, and in case you were wondering, this makes it a little more active, a little more punk, a little more fun. A lot of that's thanks to Gibbons, but the instrumental element is spikier as well. Where Dummy started off floating through the aforementioned theremin melancholy, Portishead's first noise, on the title song, is keyboard dissonance, a repeating motif that sounds like a child banging his small fists on a piano.
Gibbons comes off just as tortured as before, only this time around she's grouchier and a hair less bored. Before, she'd eke out ennui on lines like "Mysterons"'s "All for nothing." "Cowboys" finds her clawing at the command "Don't despair," which is about as hopeful as she gets. Certainly, there's still something old and British and fairytale-like about Gibbons's voice. But perhaps the pre-Raphaelite damsel from Dummy stumbled onto a copy of Mary Wollstonecraft in her father's library or something. That, or she's been listening to Eartha Kitt records. In any case, there's a brattier catch in her singing that wasn't there before. And sighing less is always a good idea.
Portishead are a charming band--charming in the manner of surf guitar and Mahalia Jackson. Just as Dick Dale rides cascading waves of speed and Jackson sticks with those long and solemn hymns, Portishead, emotionally, coop up their words and their sound in the same beautiful room. There's more longing than love, more self-pity than self-esteem, more swaying than dancing, and not much by way of joy. Portishead is a good record. But great pop music is filled with many mansions, with deviations and mood swings--great records are made by schizophrenics who can only take the agony if a little ecstasy sometimes comes their way.
I'll say this for Portishead, though--they've got stamina. Living with gnawing angst takes endurance. Finally, I thought when I got to the second-to-last song on the album, called "Elysium." Finally, a little bliss after all those blahs. Sucker. Foiled again, expecting an ode to happiness from lethargic limeys. The song does start off with marvelous little chemistry-set boiling sounds, but once the groove sets in, Gibbons is back to her old tricks, announcing, "I despise myself." Doesn't she know how great her auto-hate comes off? Listening to her go on with such haunted verve about how undesirable she is is a little like talking to an anorexic. You just want to scream, "You're not fat!" And thus, "Elysium" is meant only ironically.
Guess we'll have to wait another three years to find out what happens. Will Beth find happiness? Will she learn to like herself? Will somebody love her? And if so, will she just rock out already? Until then, relax. Have a seat in Portishead's elegant, velvety room. But not every day! And not in the morning! When Emily Dickinson wrote that "Elysium is as far as to/ The very nearest room," she never had a Portishead fanatic for an upstairs neighbor.