I bought Amber a record player. Now, something to play on it. Down the street. In the store. “Dummy please”. A favourite record I hadn’t visited in years.
Portishead was (is) a three piece band formed in Bristol in 1991; Beth Gibbons, Geoff Barrow, and Adrian Utley.
Whenever I listen, I take what I can. Vibe, lyric… s p o o k y noises.
This time it was in the mix. The beats, the guitar, the vocals, all further apart than I remembered; the bass not quite as low.
Mood conquers all. A moodiness emerges in each track, and each track, when taken together, builds the moodiness of the album. The vocals alone would be haunting over anything, Gibbons’ voice pierces comfort, injecting eerie anxiety. When stirred with those hip-hop beats, the trip-hop vibe at the intersection of genre is created.
In Sour Times, Gibbons sings, “nobody loves me, it’s true, not like you do”, achingly earnest; explicit, approaching parody. But because it pushes towards the mood, along with every other element of the track, it lands. Like a monobloc chair, it’s beautiful because its design matches its purpose.
The mood can be felt anywhere but it is not without geography and time. Portishead, named for the coastal town some ten miles to the west, was birthed in Bristol; in nights lit by the red and blue of a war on rave and choked by post-Thatcher deprivation.
Mysterons opens with a soaring theremin1, the quintessential B-movie sound of the future. Then, a vinyl scratch, guitar responding to vocals, “Did you really want?”.
Both a challenge and a question, loss, implied. She asks the listener, you, what did you want? What didn’t you get? A theremin once sounded like the future; the sound of UFOs and robots. Now, here in the future, there are only the sounds of UAPs and LLMs.
In Glory Box, a band-pass filter on the vocals imitates the sound of the early 20th century. Combined with the strings, there is a clear gesturing to the past. “Looking at the same picture through a different frame”, Gibbons sings. Isn’t that what we’re all doing all the time? Her vocals could be antagonistic, but they’re pleading. The guitar again responds, amplifying. At the end, “This is the beginning of forever”, the reverb builds, the hip-hop’s back, and we fade out. Continuation implied, now out of ears’ reach.
If we consider music as how we decorate time, there are a number of audio effects that directly play with this. Vinyl scratches and decayed audio are THE sound of manipulated time. Reverb stretches time out through the imitation (or use) of real space.
The afters is both a physical and temporal space. Post-rave, a clock ticks as your play-space shrinks; from the club, to the flat, to the room. The banishing circle of friends, old and new, turns into whoever doesn’t have work tomorrow (or who’s too out of it to care). The typical chronology of the mainstream is subverted temporarily by an informal silent agreement.
There’s a thrill, but also an oppression felt. You are free now, but with every second, you feel the presence of the mainstream more… As the sun rises (or hits new heights), the spell slowly breaks. This is happening. The approach, the mood, is all you have in your control. Portishead on the speaker is a clear signal to the group that the DJ (the only person who can still see their phone) is making an attempt at a smooth, albeit spooky, landing.
For this band, Portishead, what comes after? After the afters? After the after-after-party? After you’ve caught the afters vibe, bottled it and sold it to universal acclaim? The mainstream that’s been squeezing the life out of you has noticed you, and it likes what it hears.
Portishead are haunted by their success. To be haunted is to suffer a returning. An event occurs in time, and something remembers, a building, a room, a mind, a body, a spirit, a public, a BBC spy drama, a dinner party.
Anticipation is a key component of The Haunting. Either after the event, or the first visitation, an anxiety presents itself as you await the spectre, the return. Between albums, were Portishead haunted by themselves, haunted by their success and the newly summoned spirit of trip-hop?
I see Third, their third album, as a response to this anxiety. They choose to haunt-back.
Following my (re)visitation, I stretched my wings and listened to the band’s next two releases. Their self-titled sophomore effort, while great, is often overlooked for Third; a ritual I too will repeat here.
Third came out in 2008, eleven years after Portishead. I first listened through it as I was going to sleep. I’ve found Dummy’s spooky, downtempo vibe good late-night listening. By track four I was wide awake.
The beats were less b e a t - y, this was something different, something new. (What does it mean when a popular album from 2008 sounds new?)
The sound is different, the music is harsher, more acerbic… but the mood is the same?
Throughout the album, musical elements are introduced suddenly, requiring brace position. Strings are lower and clearer in the mix with feedback blurring into synthesis.
It rhymes with their older work, but after ten years of silence, THE2 trip-hop band is choosing not to make trip-hop.
Machine Gun tears through any chance of sleep. It follows Deep Water, a charming ukulele break in the dread where Gibbons sings “deep water won’t scare me tonight”. …In Machine Gun she sings “Well I was scared”. Portishead are pushing the mood again structurally. Reassurance is followed by the one thing it could not keep at bay. The titular machine gun is a repeated 4-beat pattern, various instruments join then leave, but the pattern is consistent. The vocals and the gun dance. A call and response that’s heard like an exclamation mark on the lyrics, or a strikethrough. “Looking for a saviour”. “Return myself to me and recognise the poison in my heart… there is no other place…”!
As the track ends, the beat doesn’t break, but the waveforms begin to disintegrate. The machine gun is unrelenting, but the container starts to crack. As the synth comes in at the end, it is too resigned to be hopeful. Despite everything, you step forward.
In We Carry On, the bass line fights the live drums at the edge of the beat. “The pace of time we can’t survive / time it grinds… and on and on I tell myself it’s this I can’t disguise”. The drums march, ordering onward steps, time’s arrow only marching forward. A high-pitch drone conjures hospital beds, but nothing slows, we carry on, moving forward. The drums flourish at the end, ripples of machine gun.
In his 2014 book, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, Mark Fisher lamented the slow cancellation of the future. As we lost our ability to imagine, to hope, for something new, something better, “the feeling of belatedness, of living after the gold rush, is as omnipresent as it is disavowed”. There is a cultural malaise, and collapsing of time that can be seen in “the reliance of current artists on styles that were established long ago [, suggesting] that the current moment is in the grip of a formal nostalgia”. This cultural moment we find ourselves doggy-paddling in, is then haunted by the futures that were once imagined.
Trip-hop as an imagination of the future was crushed alongside rave and scavenged for aesthetics. Listening to Dummy then, is to invite haunting. Something released 30 years ago continues to feel fresh because it was a potential future that failed to materialise. Third was released into the future that came to be, and maybe that is what distinguishes it from the first two albums. Third refuses to be that ghost. But can this refusal hold when Third itself is now 18 years old?
Where listeners may return to Dummy for the warm duvet of the night.3 Third doesn’t do duvets. This band refuses to raise its ghost. They won’t deliver a lost future, instead making something harsh and present and difficult.
But can you refuse nostalgia forever, or does time and capital eventually reduce all media commodities to it? I’m looking at Third through this particular frame, but it was novel to me. Time will tell how I feel about it in 20 years. It’s new to me, but nostalgic to someone else? Maybe a haunting can only be delayed, not escaped. Maybe Third is itself now a lost future; the band has been largely silent since.
My instinct says no, the album feels less like an imagining of the future and more like a knife, slashed angrily.