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ON THE COVER | NEWS & VIEWS | THE TOWN DANDY May 8, 2008
Third is an unnecessary album. From the beginning, all Portishead needed in the way of legacy was a pair of albums that felt like they'd dropped out of nowhere — somebody's attic, maybe, or rescued from the flooded basement of a bankrupt '70s soul label. Portishead built songs carefully out of just a few elements — drums (always blurring the distinction between sampled and live, sparse, spooky guitar, and the centerpiece of it all, Beth Gibbon's lilting, anguished voice. Dummy and Portishead are simply elegant, grown-up albums that manage to be so without feeling elitist or pretentious. The mystery, ecstasy, and sensuality of the band was inscrutable — one doesn't even feel the pull toward dissecting the song's elements or speculating about the source of the samples. It's as if songs like "Glory Box" and "Cowboys," samples included, were always just meant to be — like the people who were sampled didn't realize the real meaning of their original tracks until they became a part of this otherly thing. But man, all of that gets shattered when the band's founder, Geoff Barrow, starts a MySpace pages where he blogs about hating bands like Gorillaz, and doesn't want Portishead's music used in commercials, and frequently peppers his misspelled posts with the word "fuk" (sic) like a petulant 14-year-old. Portishead does not belong on the Internet, should not give interviews (thankfully, Gibbons doesn't), and ought to only exist as a cloud of existential mystery hovering near Bristol. But Third is out, it's Portishead, and it's dark and scary and beautiful, so we might as well live with it. There are a few songs that retain those elements of '90s Portishead — "Hunter" recalls "Glory Box" with restrained elegance — but the most interesting bit is an unexpected one. "Deep Water," not even two minutes long, is an absolute revelation. A plunka-plunka ditty that could easily have been a 1920s pop hit, with backup vocals that resonate with the warmth of a barbershop quartet on AM radio. That they manage to pull this off on an album full of what has come to be called "trip-hop," without making it feel the slightest bit out of place, proves that Portishead deal not so much in genre as in mood. The band says as much with a ukulele as they do with the relentless drum machine of "Machine Gun" or the evil foghorn synthsounds of "Threads." It's also a rare glimmer of light from the self-hating that Gibbons perpetrates throughout "Third," as she sings, "No matter how far I drift, deep waters won't scare me tonight." It's just barely buoyant on an album that sounds like drowning, but "Deep Water" is a signpost suggesting that just maybe there's still hope. — Joel Hartse
Steve Reich's work stands today as one of the pillars of modern music. Along with his contemporaries Philip Glass and Terry Riley, his exploration of the potential emotional weight of the cyclical repetition of music phrases in the 1960s and '70s was not only one of the last great movements in Western art music, but also the conceptual blueprint for modern day loop-based music genres like hip hop, techno and much of the experimental underground, not to mention most modern classical music that followed. Unlike his other minimalist brethren (with the exception of La Monte Young) Reich has remained relevant through the years, with innovations that still revolve around his signature use of melodic fragments with interlocking rhythmic repetition. Reich has not shied away from dealing with overtly political topics in his music, and his new release, Daniel Variations, is no exception. Initially premiered in 2006 as part of Reich's 70th birthday celebration, Variations was composed in remembrance of American journalist Daniel Pearl, who was famously kidnapped and executed in 2002 by Pakistani militants while on assignment in the Middle East. With female soprano vocalists, Reich takes Pearl's last recorded words, "My name is Daniel Pearl. I am a Jewish American from Encino, California," (which appeared on a videotape filmed by his captors, along with his subsequent beheading), and casts them against his trademark marimba/vibraphone pulse with violin lines weaving in and out and heavy, chiming piano lines thundering beneath. Through the different movements, Reich parallels Pearl's final words with experts from the biblical Book of Daniel, drawing a connection between the post-911 world of "terror" and the book's apocalyptic predictions. Appropriately enough, Variations is Reich's darkest piece to date. Cast in a grim minor key with a somber tone overall that is highly unusual for Reich, it's darkness surpasses even his 1988 work Different Trains with its juxtaposition of Reich's childhood memories of train travels with audio fragments from interviews with Holocaust survivors. While his pieces usually have a transfixing quality that evokes the busy and complex nature of human life, Variations evokes quite the opposite, with intense maximalism in place of his omnipresent slow shifting minimalism, depicting a world coming to terms with the brutal realities of war, death and terror. It's a particularly heavy topic to tackle, and what Reich is attempting to capture may be beyond the scope of a piece of music, at least in his style. Unfortunately it's tough to look past the overwrought nature of the piece, and its lofty emotional goals make it hard to connect with on a base level. Much like Glass's later pieces, an inescapable air of pretension clouds the work, and while it is largely devoid of the thick layer of schmaltz that cakes Glass' recent film scores, Reich still aims a bit too high and ends up sounding more bloated and operatic than dignified. While Reich's best work seems to exist outside of the modern classical lineage, in territory less daunting and more universal, the overall feel of Variations relies heavily on the same traditions that his work once eclipsed. It seems that Reich has fallen into the same stale pretension of the concert hall that the post-Cage-ian "new music" linage that his minimalism is rooted in sought to break down. In Reich's defense, the unavoidably serious nature of the subject matter might warrant this. And it's not as if Reich chose the topic: Pearl's father approached Reich to commission the piece as an artistic memorial for his son, and with that in mind it seems that Reich may have done his best to tackle the subject. The CD also includes the less noteworthy "Variations for Vibes, Pianos & Strings," a work from 2005, which comes off as a stale arrangement of Reich's musical trademarks and fails to construct anything new with them, almost like a Reich paint-by-numbers. Though the effort is still there, it seems as if Reich's work may have finally lost the spark that he kept alive for so long. — Spencer Doran
House shows often make a virtue out of necessity, providing a place for touring bands that sometimes can't find another venue, and providing a more intimate musical experience. The erasure of the segregation between audience and performer is a central tenet of the punk DIY ethic as well. So what happens when someone who's nurtured in this collegial hothouse atmosphere blows up big? Last week, Kimya Dawson played an under-the-radar show in Arcata that proves that some successful artists actually can, in that overused phrase, keep it real. Because of the Top-10 success of the Juno soundtrack (on which her songs are prominently featured) it wouldn't be surprising if Dawson only played in bigger commercial venues. She came to Arcata to play again after playing such places as New York's Webster Hall, and appearing on TV shows like The View and Sesame Street. She's still true to her DIY roots though, and likes to play house shows. The show was a word-of-mouth affair, and when a local radio station initially announced the show, the folks who put it on decided to put out a fake cancellation to discourage fair weather fans. Eighty tickets were actually sold on the day of the show, but you had to be in on the underground grapevine to know about it. This worked out well, because even with a limit of 80 people, the place was jam-packed. Dawson's long-time tour mate Matty Pop Chart opened up with a spirited, if ragged, lo-fi set. He sang, played guitar and drums. His most memorable tune was a tribute to fellow one-man-band artist, cult rockabilly singer Hazel Adkins. What came next was an unexpected treat. French band L'Orchidee D'Hawai offered an unpredictable mix of surf, Eastern European song and '60s pop. They were energetic and skilled, as virtuosic and tight as Matty Pop Chart was raw and loose. The drummer later told me he was happy to play house shows in America because when they try to do such things in France they usually get shut down by the cops, which was a surprise to me. Kimya Dawson then came out to play with her husband Angelo Spencer, and she had the audience under her spell from the start, cracking jokes. Unlike some of the other artists on the K Records roster, Dawson's songs are sometimes childlike, but never childish. Not possessed of the greatest singing voice, her songs get across on the strength of her humor, honesty and soulfulness. She ranged from tunes from an upcoming children's record (her young son Panda was sleeping in another part of the house) to self-deprecating songs about hipsters. She sang about darker matters too. Her song "12/26," inspired by the tsunami of 2004, could just as easily be about Katrina, or any other natural disaster and government neglect — she honed in on the telling detail that made it all the more affecting. Who knows if she'll be able to play such shows much longer, but a show like this in someone's living room is an experience that similar shows at bars, clubs or theaters will never compare to. — Jay Herzog
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Third
Daniel Variations.
Kimya Dawson.