Portishead - Dummy

There’s no doubt that if I’d known about this album as a kid, my musical trajectory would have changed completely. The music resonates so well with me now that I have complete FOMO for what I missed - the trip-hoppy beats make me do a stank face every time, like a guitar player grimacing out a powerful solo. Instead of pursuing the alt-rock/grunge/classic rock obsessive path I chose growing up, I might have been tossed headfirst into the world of electronic beats and industrial sounds at an early age, following them all the way through to the albums they influenced in the rising industrial/trip-hop sound of the later 90’s.

Electronic and electronic-adjacent bands can get a lot of flak for relying on computerized sounds to carry their music rather than on songwriting or more universally accepted musical practices. But that’s an issue for all kinds of artists - the 70’s were littered with rock and roll bands who thought a distorted electric guitar was a worthy substitute for actual lyrics or songwriting skills. Hell, I’ll bet when the acoustic guitar was invented there were people out there calling it a gimmick, that you couldn’t have real music without a bow vibrating the strings. New technology is new technology, and songwriting is songwriting, no matter where you are in the timeline.

But Portishead, even in a genre that’s seen by outsiders as full of gimmicky sounds, is impossible to classify as anything but song-driven brilliance. The beats and sounds they choose fit the songwriting perfectly, adding to the atmosphere or the emotional content at any given moment. It all aligns perfectly, the new sounds and inventive songwriting producing an additive effect, a true 1+1=3 situation.

This album has quickly become one of my favorites ever, and will be in heavy rotation for a long time to come.

From the roundup Jamwise #46 - Best Albums of 1994.