Portishead – Dummy

A TAV Essential Listening Album.

Dummy is the debut album by English band Portishead. Released in August 1994 on Go! Beat,the album earned critical acclaim, winning the 1995 Mercury Music Prize.

It is often credited with popularising the trip hop genre and is frequently cited in lists of the best albums of the 1990s.

"The collaboration of studio whiz Geoff Barrow and singer Beth Gibbons, Dummy was made at the same time as a short film noir called "To Kill a Dead Man," and the same approach--gloomy, tor-mented, and wildly melodramatic--permeates the album. 

"Sour Times" (the hit in which Gibbons cries, again and again, "Nobody loves me, it's true") and the more cryptic "Glory Box" are the linchpins of the album, defining its sound: dark flashes of old soul and film music, dehumanized electronic bleeps, Gibbons emoting like she's consumed by shame, and a bass-and-beat pulse derived from the slow bump and grind of the Bristol scene that spawned Bar-row's old collaborators, Massive Attack." - Douglas Wolk

"NME summed up the record by saying, "This is, without question, a sublime debut album. But so very, very sad." It observed, "From one angle, its languid slowbeat blues clearly occupy similar terrain to soulmates Massive Attack and all of Bristol hip-hop's extended family. But from another these are avant garde ambient moonscapes of a ferociously experimental nature." The review concluded that "Portishead's post-ambient, timelessly organic blues are probably too left-field, introspective and downright Bristolian to grab short-term glory as some kind of Next Big Thing. 

Q described Dummy as "perhaps the year's most stunning debut album" and proclaimed that "the singer's frail, wounded-sparrow vocals and Barrow's mastery of jazz-sensitive soul/hip hop grooves and the almost forgotten art of scratching are an enthralling combination".

Mojo said that "Portishead make music for an early evening drinks party on the set of The Third Man. There is nothing kitschy about them either... Beth Gibbons' voice has a genuine chill to it, and Geoff Barrow's background soundscapes are worthy of Lalo Schiffrin and Nellee Hooper."

Rolling Stone said, "From tape loops and live strings, Fender Rhodes riffing and angelic singing, these English subversives construct très hip Gothic hip-hop... Assertive rhythms and quirky production, however, save Portishead from languishing in any cosy retro groove. Instead they manage yet another – very smart – rebirth of cool."  - Wiki

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