Stars of the Nineties still dominate the media, but British dance music is more exciting today
One might have thought that the pop music critic would be a forward-looking species, constantly on the hunt for the Next Big Thing. Oddly, however, it often seems to be quite the opposite: the critic is a nostalgic beast, happier to reminisce about the Big Things of yesteryear than to brave the shock of the new. The extensive and thoroughly misty-eyed reception given to Third, the confusingly titled fourth album by the Bristol band Portishead, is a case in point.
Of the many electrifying acts to emerge from the Bristol scene in the mid- to late Nineties, Portishead was always the nicest and safest. In recent interviews its founder and producer Geoff Barrow has complained that the band's output was miscast as trendy dinner-party music, but the ingredients were always there. It had none of the stoned, footloose inventiveness of Tricky, whose songs seemed to emerge from somewhere just the other side of sanity; neither did it have the reggae-influenced dance edge of Massive Attack (coincidentally, both acts also have new albums out this year).
Portishead did, however, have soul, thanks largely to the haunting voice of their lead singer, Beth Gibbons. The best songs on the band's debut album, Dummy - "Glory Box", "Sour Times" and "Wandering Star" - blended her tortured vocals with flickering samples and just enough bass to sound gritty (not enough to interrupt the over-dinner conversation). It was a combination that won them mainstream chart success in Europe and America as well as critical acclaim: Dummy was awarded the Mercury Music Prize in 1995.
After a ten-year hiatus, Portishead have returned with an album that sounds like a very successful band trying to escape the mainstream. There are tantalising glimpses of the old soul fulness on tracks such as the yearning "The Rip" and the bizarre, banjo-driven doo-wop number "Deep Water", where Gibbons is allowed to work her eerie magic. Elsewhere, screeching guitars, pummelling basslines, helicopters and wailing alarms do their best to drive away fairweather fans.
The relentless, driving tone is set on the first track, "Silence", and comes to its climax on "Machine Gun", which lives up to its title with the clatter of rapid fire. The album ends with "Threads", a squall of thrash guitars followed by a sporadic series of foghorn-like drones. By this point, your dinner guests will be choking on their risotto.
Third is a good album, in that it is imaginative and meticulously produced, with some genuinely affecting moments. But I wonder, once the hype has worn off, how many people will find themselves playing it with any regularity? If Barrow wanted to prove that Portishead's music is not easy listening, he has succeeded. The question is whether this album is listenable at all.
The irony is that there is no need to look to the stars of the Nineties for adventurous, experimental electronic music. Right here, right now, Britain is experiencing something of a golden age - you just wouldn't know it from reading the papers. Steppas' Delight: Dubstep Present to Future, a new compilation brought out on the Soul Jazz label, showcases some of the brilliantly inventive music emerging from the dubstep scene, which was born in the unlikely surroundings of Croydon in the early Noughties and has since gathered a substantial fanbase around the world.
This is dance music, but not as we previously knew it: gone are the easy 4/4 beats, the bouncy feel-good synths, the Ecstasy-fuelled vocals. What is left is spare, halting, even ponderous. If there are vocals, they are dark and stuttering; industrial noises rise from nowhere and collapse into fragments of rhythm. If that doesn't sound like much fun, wait until the infectious, jolting bass kicks in. Followers of dubstep don't need drugs to make them dance.
Steppas' Delight includes tracks by veterans of the scene (as many of them started making tracks in their early teens this puts them in their late teens and twenties), such as Benga, whose track "Night" is one of the biggest dubstep hits so far. He is represented here with the equally com pulsive "Evolution", which starts with a simple, ice-cream-van loop and then thwacks you out of nowhere with an angry great bassline. Another instant classic is Uncle Sam's "Round the World Girls", a reggae song made stranger and more bassy by the Finnish producer Tes La Rok.
Dubstep producers are magpies, shamelessly borrowing from reggae, drum'n'bass, garage and R'n'B, and morphing the ingredients into the fractured, troubled and startlingly original sound of the early 21st century. If these emerging artists have avoided the media spotlight that is partly through choice: this is the antithesis of celebrity-driven pop culture. Dubstep's stars go by code names, dress like ordinary Croydon boys, and market themselves on pirate radio stations and MySpace. They do not yet have the luxury of taking ten years to make an album, and their creativity has not yet been gobbled up and spat out by advertisers or the more rapacious sections of the music industry. They have all that to look forward to.
"Third" by Portishead is out now on Universal "Steppas' Delight" (Soul Jazz) is out on 12 May
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