PORTISHEAD at Sound Academy, Sunday, October 9. Rating: NNNN
They may be a band of middle-aged introverts who barely move on stage, but Portishead more than make up for it with a razor-sharp ability to create mood and high drama using only a handful of elements.
Most of their power as a live act comes from the interplay of their skeletal ominous soul ballads and the admirably restrained atmospheric video projections.
Beth Gibbons seems most comfortable hiding her face behind her hair, but grainy distorted footage of the singer clutching her mic flickering on the giant screen above her head proved just how powerful electronically-generated visuals can be when they’ve got a strong vision and well defined aesthetic steering them.
All the high concept videos in the world wouldn’t mean much if the music wasn’t up to snuff, and when an act is so closely associated with a forgotten genre like triphop as Portishead are, you can’t help but go into one of their rare live shows wondering if it’s going to feel like a dated nostalgia tour.
The band seems aware of that, and despite having an incredibly small catalog of music to draw from, managed to avoid the temptation of pulling too heavily from their massively successful 1995 debut album Dummy, while still dropping just enough fan favourites to satisfy the sold out club. While the material from their last two albums is much darker and shies away from big pop hooks, using that more experimental post-punk-influenced material to frame Dummy-era songs tells a musical story that’s much more complex than “aging triphop band tours again”.
It might turn out to be another decade until they get around to recording a new album, but judging from how much power they’ve still got on stage, we’re willing to wait.
