All dressed up

Where else can Portishead go?

by Charles Taylor

It's no accident that the music of Portishead (whose homonymous second album on London has just hit the stores) has never sounded better than when it's been used in the movies. Portishead make an almost wholly atmospheric sound -- sinuous, snaky, and slightly ominous -- that nonetheless feels incomplete, amorphous, waiting for something to attach itself to in order to find its meanings. When you see the black-hooded figure of Elina Lowensohn in Nadja gliding tearfully down an East Village avenue in a snowstorm while Portishead's "Strangers" plays over the image, or when you see Garance Clavel running happily down a sunny Paris back street in the exhilarating final shot of When the Cat's Away to the accompaniment of "Glory Box" (Portishead's finest moment to date), the music, at last, feels whole.

That's the pleasure of Portishead and also the band's limitation. There is soundtrack music that can stand on its own, even drown out the visuals it's meant to accompany. (Hooverphonic's "2 Wicky" first appeared on the Sleeping Beauty soundtrack, but it's more memorable than any image in the film except for the way Liv Tyler cupped her hands around a joint.) Portishead's isn't that sturdy, and perhaps the band suspect as much. That may be why their UK-only EP Numb came out with a band-made short film called To Kill a Dead Man, a title as suggestive and needy of something to flesh it out as the band's music.

When Portishead's debut, Dummy (London), appeared in 1994, it was positioned somewhere between the lounge craze and the advent of electronica. This was dance music (or cabaret music) for depressives, film nerds, rock-club kids -- moody, insular, and draped in its own chic hauteur. A calculated sonic collage of trip-hop beats, the crackle and pop of a scratchy pile of old Stax singles, busy signals, vocalist Beth Gibbons's soul-manqué mannerisms, '60s spy-movie music, Ennio Morricone guitars, all of it filtered through the hippest sense of ennui, Dummy managed to be a record equally for socially inept introverts and too-cool fashion plates.

Portishead is a calculated sonic collage of trip-hop beats, the crackle and pop of a scratchy pile of old Stax singles, busy signals . . . you get the idea, believe me, by the second track you get the idea. Portishead do what they do awfully well. The trouble is, they do the same damn thing over and over again. They may turn out to be the Cowboy Junkies of the '90s, the band who hit with a sustained mood piece that connects with all sorts of different listeners, and then show themselves to be one-trick ponies on the follow-up.

I tried, I really, really tried to concentrate on Portishead, but something kept claiming my attention -- a magazine, the ironing, sorting through the papers on my desk. The harder I tried to bear down on this music, the more it seemed to squirm away. There is an affectless, tossed-off quality that seems deliberate on the band's part. It can be very amusing to hear Gibbons's borrowed funk phrasings, the way she sings the word "fantasy" as "fanta-say" on "Over," but her sangfroid makes you wonder, didn't she have any fun listening to those George Clinton records she copped her licks from?

Occasionally something distinguishes itself from the wash, like "Only You," or the way Gibbons's voice seems to be reaching us through a wire on "Half Day Closing," or the cocktail jazz noir of "Undenied." The latter seems to pick up where the old standard "Angel Eyes" stopped. It proceeds through a deserted landscape of dark streets and nearly empty bars where everyone is moving in a fugue state. The effect is like those moments in David Lynch movies that are like tableaux, where the only living thing is the undercurrent of insistent malevolent lassitude.

For the most part, Portishead sticks to narrowly defined turf. Which is harder to accept when you consider the drama and experimentation that other performers are providing in dance-oriented music. (Put on Björk's new Homogenic and try tuning out.) Maybe the band have enough good will built up from Dummy to cast their spell again. Me, I'm waiting for the movie.