Portishead - Dummy (20th Anniversary)

Celebrate the 20th Anniversary of Portishead's Mercury Prize winning debut album 'Dummy'. Often credited with popularizing the trip hop genre, the 1994 record features the singles "Sour Times" and "Glory Box". Dummy is a masterwork of downbeat and desperation. They invented their own kind of virtuosity, one that encompassed musicianship, technology, and aura.

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, tormented, 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, dehumanised 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 Barrow's old collaborators, Massive Attack.

Heavyweight vinyl produced by Go! Discs Limited / Island Records in 2014. Gatefold sleeve. 

TRACKLISTING:

1. Mysterons
2. Sour Times
3. Strangers
4. It Could Be Sweet
5. Wandering Star
6. Numb
7. Roads
8. Pedestal
9. Biscuit
10. Glory Box