Released on 22 August 1994, "Dummy" was the debut studio album by English band Portishead, receiving critical acclaim and eventually winning the 1995 Mercury Music Prize, the album is oftenly credited with popularising the trip hop genre and one of the most exciting and groundbreaking records of all-time, spawning three singles "Sour Times", "Glory Box" & "Numb".
The band's masterminds Geoff Barrow and Beth Gibbons met during an Enterprise Allowance course in February 1991. Soon they started recording their first ideas for the songs in Neneh Cherry's kitchen. Back in Bristol, they recorded at the Coach House Studios. The first song that they finished for the album was "It Could Be Sweet" then the third and final component Adrian Utley joined them while they were recording at Coach House Studios, heard their first recorded track "It Could Be Sweet", and started exchanging ideas on music. Barrow taught Utley sampling while Utley introduced the band to unusual sounds such as cimbaloms and theremins, which led to an "amalgamation of ideas".According to Barrow, "It was like a light-bulb coming on" when Utley joined them, and they realised they could make their own samples not found on other records, and created one of the most distinctive sounds of the decade.
During the production of the album, the band uses a number of hip hop techniques, such as sampling, scratching, and loop-making.The album was not recorded digitally. They sampled music from other records, but they also recorded their own original music, which was then recorded onto vinyl records before manipulating them on record decks to sample, in order to create a vintage sound, Barrow said that they distressed the vinyl records they had recorded by "putting them on the studio floor and walking across them and using them like skateboards", and they also recorded the sound through a broken amplifier.For the track "Sour Times", the album samples Lalo Schifrin's "The Danube Incident" and Smokey Brooks' (Henry Brooks, Otis Turner) "Spin It Jig"; for "Strangers", Weather Report's (Wayne Shorter) "Elegant People"; for "Wandering Star", War's "Magic Mountain"; for "Biscuit", Johnnie Ray's "I'll Never Fall in Love Again" (not the Bacharach/David song); and for "Glory Box", Isaac Hayes' "Ike's Rap II".
Although they never recognized having invented it, they did redefine it, and the fact is that the scene where they were located in Bristol at that time was the trigger for the gloomy and hopeless style, a legacy of the Thatcher era, in this area is where Beth Gibbons and Geoff Barrow coincide while they were in a project to create jobs, to be able to finance concerts in small places, but the union would turn to other musical directions different from what other groups such as Massive Attack and the curious Tricky presented to us.
The album was dark and enveloping, haunting and weird and had all the elements necessary to be the soundtrack of cult noir films, with touches of jazz and electronic sounds that were so disparate but that created something unique and totally unprecedented, where the music enveloped and Gibbons' voice captured everything, starting with the incredible "Sour Times" that was built from the sample of a Lalo Schifrin piece "Danube Incident", Gibbons with that visceral voice and a devastating soundscape plus the mysterious arrangements of Adrian Utley and Barrow's samplers.
An undoubtedly strange and seductive album in every sense of the word and that was what made it the album of 1994 that all the British magazines of the time paid reverence to, from the most disparate to the most ad-hoc in style, not only because of "Sour Times" they also had "Glory Box" which was supported by a great vocal part accompanied by intense guitars, as well as the haunting "Numb", it was undoubtedly a sublime debut in the history of pop, despite the sadness and loneliness that surrounded it, on the one hand it had great sound influences that put them on par with any outstanding group but on the other hand they had an avant-garde spirit and experimental ferocity so natural, that gave it that unique detail.
Released finally in August 1994. It helped to cement the reputation of Bristol as the capital of trip hop, a nascent genre which was then often referred to simply as "the Bristol sound". Listing it among the best trip hop albums. The album helped trip hop cross over to mainstream popularity, as a background music in cafes and boutiques and found appeal among audiences of other genres, including alternative rock and R&B listeners.
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