Portishead's Dummy (33 1/3 #85)

In the UK, a dummy isn’t just a mannequin or an idiot; it’s also what Americans would call a pacifier. Savor the irony in the title of Portishead’s debut album. The album may suggest coziness, sonic swaddling, the gentle soundtrack to a raver’s comedown—& in 1994, ravers were plenty familiar with pacifiers. But Dummy doesn’t coddle, it unsettles. It tastes not like warm milk but coppery & bitter, like blood. Despite its two-plus decades spent soundtracking makeout sessions, it cradles a terrible loneliness in its heart. Despite its reputation as dinner-party music, it is straight-up discomfort food: curl-up-and-die music, head-under-the-covers music. It’s dark, dank, & quintessentially Bristol, mingling a chilling harbor fog with the resin of a thousand spliffs left to burn down in a haze.

With the exception of two UK singles released shortly before the album, there was no advance warning of the wind blowing in from the West Country. Portishead weren’t a gigging band; they only began playing live after the album started selling the kind of numbers that no one, at least no one in the band, expected it to. They were barely a band at all, in the traditional sense of the word. Their core lineup consisted of Geoff Barrow, a 22-year-old hip-hop fan obsessed with turntable alchemy; Adrian Utley, a 37-year-old jazz guitarist looking for a way out of the 20th century; and Beth Gibbons, a 29-year-old singer who’d grown up on a farm &, prior to Portishead, had “probably done more singing in her bedroom than on stage,” Barrow reckoned. Yet there isn’t a sound or a syllable out of place on Dummy. For 50 minutes, the album sustains a single, all-enveloping mood;…