Dummy

Portishead: “Dummy” (Go! Beat)

Sometimes it happens that all you need to hear are the opening bars to a tune to know that something very, very special indeed is going on here. So it was when I first heard ‘Sour Times’, the second of the ten tracks on Portishead’s groundbreaking Dummy record. Such first impressions are rarely misleading and, at this stage, having basked in the weird and wonderful sounds of Dummy in its entirety to my heart and ears’ content, the initial greatness of that first encounter has been reinforced again and again.

At times revenants of all kinds of hues and essences ghost over even the most unique of musical creations and it seems to me that the unsurpassable spectres of the likes of Billie Holiday and Frank Zappa haunt the hybrid and highly imaginative melodies of Dummy. Holiday because the music obviously draws on classic underground jazz and Beth Gibbons’ intonation, especially on ‘It Could Be Sweet’, conjures up Billie’s immortal image. Zappa arises from out of the layers of the compositions due to the degree of experimentalism Portishead bring to this outstanding, unforgettable listening experience.

That may position Dummy somewhat anachronistically but, of course, anyone who’s remotely familiar with Portishead will know that their use of modern dance techniques and the manner by which they utilise samples of other songs position P in a thoroughly (post)modern, eclectic environment.

The juxtaposition of old-style crooning with new in-your-face heavy dance rhythms is frighteningly good on ‘Strangers’, which features samples of Weather Report’s ‘Elegant People’. While Beth Gibbons’ angelic tones on ‘Wandering Star’ are deconstructed by a mean, low-down back-beat, offkilteredly interspersed with a mocking, whistling Dixie break and the kind of deadly and deathly serious lyrics like “Please could you stay a while to share my grief/It’s such a lovely day to have to always feel this way/And the time that I will suffer less is when I never have to wake.”

It’s impossibly unfair to single out individual titles for particular attention. As it is equally difficult and mind-boggling to analyse the multi-faceted structures of every aria encoded and enregistered onto Dummy. Belatedly, all I can say is that Dummy is not only an album of last year, this year and maybe quite a few other years, but already it’s one of the records of the decade. Tearfully and soulfully brilliant, Dummy is great art. An authentically new mode of playing and a new way of listening.

• Patrick Brennan