Portishead live

Portishead

Sound Academy, Toronto

Monday, October 10, 2011

I turned 40 two days before this show. It was awfully nice of Portishead—in Toronto for the first time in 14 years—to allow me to cross their name off my list of must-see acts, acts whose music has altered my life in one way or another. At this point, I’m not sure there’s anyone left on the list who is a) alive, b) still performing, and c) not in an artistically decrepit state.

Though their beloved debut album came out in 1994, Portishead are not an oldies act; their 2008 album Third found them pushing themselves into darker directions much more abrasive than anything they’d ever done, and worlds away from the trip-hop movement they helped spawn—and that they quickly grew to despise for the milquetoast yuppie sex-party soundtrack it was. In Eye Weekly’s 2008 cross-Canada critics’ poll, Third took the top spot.

That album is now three years old and apparently there’s a new one on the way. Despite defining the zeitgeist in the mid-’90s, Portishead have always existed in a timeless continuum, borrowing heavily from the past (soul, jazz, blues, hip-hop, film soundtracks) while simultaneously forging future sounds. So while there was the occasional moment at this show where Geoff Barrow’s scratching sounded gimmicky whereas it once sounded groundbreaking, Portishead still sounded as fresh as they did the first time I heard “Sour Times” in a record store and was stopped cold in my tracks.

Portishead don’t do anything half-assed; they take their time, do what they want when and how they want to do it. It’s well worth waiting for. The visuals, a mix of live editing and animation resembling early ’70s children’s TV shows (hello, fortysomethings), were stunning. The band was almost flawless; the only quibble I could make was that the keyboardist didn’t use the theremin placed right in front of him for “Mysterons.” Beth Gibbons’ voice is even more impressive live: not just for the way she injects extra intensity into every line, but for her ability to convey fragility and strength at the same time. Like Feist, she can project intensity without belting it out; unlike Feist, she sounds like she deeply feels every single word.

The set leaned heavily on Dummy and Third, almost ignoring the self-titled second album, which is my personal favourite (only “Over” and “Cowboys” made the cut). I’ve barely listened to Dummy in the past 15 years, just because it was played to death in the college town where I spent the ’90s; hearing this seasoned band dig into those grooves now was extremely satisfying.

It seems silly to criticize Portishead for being too good at what they do, but the cumulative intensity was almost overbearing. Welcome breathers came from tracks like “Magic Doors,” with its cowbell funk, and a stripped-down version of “Wandering Stars,” with Beth Gibbons singing over just two guitars and embarking on the scariest scat solo you’ll ever hear in your life.

So: amazing band, amazing show, bla bla bla. Here’s the thing: as someone who spent the better part of his 20s in love with the first two Portishead records, finally seeing them live as I turn 40 was revelatory. I’d never really fully absorbed the torturous angst in Gibbons’ lyrics, although I obviously knew they were there, and her delivery alone speaks volumes more than the words themselves. Mostly I was in love with the music. Listening closely to her now, I realize how perfect her pain sounded to an owner of a lonely heart—and how I’m no longer that person, thank God.

In my youthful naïvete, the song “Glory Box,” with the chorus “Give me a reason to be a woman,” went right over my head. Why does she need a reason to be a woman? I wondered. Now I hear the narrator as a young person slightly terrified of her own sexuality, tired of playing teasing games with childish men, and longing for deep connection with someone outside the shallow small-town dating pool she’s swimming in. She’s stuck in an arrested adolescence, longing to transform into a confident, mature adult—which most of my generation (and my small college town) did for far too long, myself included (and some are still there). What’s more, the song ends with Gibbons abbreviating the line to just “Give me a reason to be”—an existentialist demand if there ever was one.

The newer material from Third is musically just as impressive as anything they’ve ever done, with the exception of “Machine Gun,” which works well enough on the recording but is interminable live, saved only by the visuals. And yet there’s something missing for me; I don’t feel it as deeply as I did when I wallowed in woe alongside Gibbons, when I felt every emotion with much more intensity than I do now. On Third, she’s still in that same emotional place—in her lyrics at least, I hope not in real life—and sings, “I’ve travelled so far but somehow feel the same / I’m so unsure.”

Now that I’m 40 and under the illusion that I’m somehow more mature and wise, I don’t expect nor want Portishead to sing about shiny, happy people. I want them to continue to do whatever the hell they want and make brilliant records and stunning stage shows. And I want to thank them for coming back into my life at this particular milestone—and not just so I can check them off on my gig scorecard.

'08 on a plate, part three

The last installment of the Top 30 of '08. Apologies for the brevity and the occasional recycling, but as my dear friend James Rocchi likes to say, December and January give every critic a bad case of "Top Ten-donitis." Part one is here; part two is here.

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James Pants – Welcome (Stones Throw).
There’s a function on most music software called “quantizing,” which ensures that every element of a track is synched-up rhythmically. It’s ensured that almost all hip-hop and electronic music of the last 20 years never misses a beat—literally. I have no idea whether the man who calls himself James Pants, a bedroom producer from Spokane, Washington, is prone to abusing his “quantizing” function, but I doubt it: his raw, synth-y take on early ’80s electro jams excels with elasticity and loose grooves that sound tangible as opposed to mechanical. Handclaps, cowbells, MPCs and 808s accentuate garage rock drumming, with bubbly bass lines that slip into punk, jazz and funk. Controversy-era Prince and the Beasties’ Check Your Head are obvious influences, but there are more than a few other ants in Mr. Pants to keep us guessing.

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Pas Chic Chic – Au Contraire (Semprini).
Montreal’s Pas Chic Chic give Franco pop a swift kick in the derriere, taking the Farfisa organs and song structures and stripping them of any twee leanings. Instead, they install an amplified arsenal of electric guitars that swirl around the pop melodies and threaten to drench them with droning psychedelics, while the rhythm section dallies back and forth between the dance floor and pummelling their point home. Sometimes that happens in the same song, like the album’s aptly-titled centrepiece, “Vous Comprenez Pourquoi?”, where searing, screeching guitars take over a the harrowing mid-section of a dramatic and driving pop song. Imagine Sonic Youth and Black Mountain bum-rushing the stage at a Belle and Sebastian show. Even at its most punishing and sinister, Pas Chic Chic manage to convey sentiments of sweetness and hope, when they’re not delivering menace, mystery and melody in equal doses. (adapted from a review that ran here in April)

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Portishead – Third (Universal).
Loneliness never sounds lovelier than in the hands of Beth Gibbons and Geoff Barrow, who return after nine years with an album that is as dark, distorted and disorienting as it is entirely intoxicating and gorgeous. This also vindicates their legacy, which was tarnished by far too many wussy jazz singers setting half-assed torch songs to downtempo hip-hop. Even in its quietest moments, Third is a tough, tenacious and often downright creepy. If they disappear for another decade in order to craft an album as good as this one, it's worth the wait.

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Q-Tip – The Renaissance (Motown/Universal).
LL Cool J put out an album this year—did anyone care? Questions about artists’ ability to age well in a hip-hop career continue to be valid, but no one told Q-Tip. Maybe a nine-year absence makes his flow grow fresher, but the Abstract MC hasn't been this on his game since the heyday of his beloved early '90s crew A Tribe Called Quest—and yet this is not a retro rehash. He’s still smooth like butta, baby, though he has yet to cheeze out entirely in his middle-age (the extraneous Norah Jones cameo notwithstanding). When he branches out into discofied funk (“ManWomanBoogie”) or guitar grooves (“Good Thang”), he pulls it off with aplomb. While many of his peers are spinning their wheels, this may well be launch Q-Tip’s own full-blown Renaissance.

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The Ruby Suns – Sea Lion (Sub Pop).
Singer/songwriter Ryan McPhun has lived by the ocean all his life: first in California, now in New Zealand. It certainly sounds like he’s spent a lot of time meditating in front of vast expanses of water; not only do many of his songs evoke a lush, warm and tropical ambiance, but you can actually hear the ocean in the background of several tracks here, with either actual birdsongs or instruments that are reverb-ed beyond recognition until they sound like aquatic fauna. There are certainly moments where it sounds like Sigur Ros staging an operetta in a grotto where the piano is slipping into the sea. But this isn’t one of those soothing “sounds of nature” albums for your massage therapist. The beauty of Sea Lion is its ability to create an entirely logical, self-contained environment where Phil Spector produces New Order on a remote African island. An acoustic Brazilian rhythm might be interrupted by an interlude of ukuleles and coconuts, which is then swept away by a loping brass section and Hawaiian guitar before giving way to African guitar lines and a choir singing in Maori. Sure, sometimes it sounds like a lo-fi Fruitopia commercial. More often than not, however, the adventures of McPhun and the Suns add up to a wildly rewarding ride that’s a wonderful left-field surprise. (adapted from the original review that ran here)

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Snailhouse – Lies on the Prize
(Unfamiliar/Saved by Vinyl).
Mike Feuerstack has spent his career in the trenches of Canadian indie music, and only now is finally reaching the prime of his career: everything here—his singing, his songwriting and his sense of arrangements—is far and above superior not only to his own discography, but to that of most of his peers in 2008, including his disciples such as The Acorn and Bruce Peninsula. Plenty of his extended family of collaborators chip in here, including old friend/drummer/producer Jeremy Gara (Arcade Fire), Angela Desveaux, and members of The Acorn and Bell Orchestre. Feuerstack’s previous work as Snailhouse had him pegged as a bit of a sad sack; while Lies on the Prize certainly has its melancholy moments, it's also a mature work that successfully balances his earlier prog influences with more straightforward singer/songwriter fare. Feuerstack has the age and experience to write with a mature voice where pessimism and harsh realism never surrender entirely to cynicism; he might live in a world where “they’ll only hear you when you lie,” but still believes that “all in good time you’ll wake up feeling fine.” These lucky 13 tracks comprise the most underrated Canadian album of 2008, which was released last June to little fanfare. With an album this timeless, however, it’s never too late to catch up. (adapted from a review that ran in the K-W Record on December 31)

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Tagaq – Auk/Blood (Jericho Beach).
Considering that the origin of Inuit throat singing is a competition between two women, Tagaq plays very well with others on her sophomore album—though not necessarily other vocalists. Duets with Mike Patton and Buck 65 fall a bit flat, compared to the way her (literally) breathtaking vocal textures weave through string arrangements by Jesse Zubot and the Kronos Quartet. Tagaq is a force of nature whose live performances are largely improvisational, but here she inhabits just enough structure to allow others into her world. Her sexuality is visceral and demanding, and on “Hunger” she slows down for a sensual reflection that's spinetingling. There's no one else in Canada—and very few anywhere else in the world—who is taking vocal music to the extremes that Tagaq is.

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Vampire Weekend – s/t (XL).
This album has had 12 months to sustain the avalanche of hype—after all, what band lands on the cover of Spin with their debut album? And yet, 10 flavours-of-the-months later, this still sounds refreshing and charming, the sound of an excitable young band throwing everything they have into three-chord pop songs: harpsichords and strings, African guitars, and a love of propulsive '60s pop, never once being more busy than they have to be. Where they go from here doesn't even matter; this is a classic debut in the vein of the Violent Femmes, Jonathan Richman or the Hidden Cameras.

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Chad Van Gaalen – Soft Airplane
(Flemish Eye).
This humble Calgarian is a creative hero to many Canadian musicians, and this album provides 13 reasons why (along with the animated videos this multi-disciplinary artist made to accompany them). Van Gaalen makes 21st century folk music with acoustic guitars, harmonicas, video game technology, found objects, banjos and bleeps—all adorning songs suited for campfire ghost stories and layered with equal parts distortion, dissonance and devastating beauty. Van Gaalen's quavering falsetto sings, "Nobody knows where we go when we're dead or when we're dreaming," but judging by the spellbinding sonic landscape he's created here, he knows a thing or two about alternate realities.

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John Zorn's Bar Kokhba – Lucifer (Tzadik).
Just look at the line-up here, and you know you can't go wrong: the Masada String Trio (Mark Feldman, Greg Cohen, Erik Friedlander), Cyro Baptista, Marc Ribot, and Joey Baron, playing songs from Zorn's second Masada songbook. This is chamber music jazz with Latin percussion and Jewish melodic motifs played by six of the finest musicians in New York City, who weave in and around each other as soloists, duos and trios all in the same track. It's sumptuous, intoxicating and, despite its superficially polite reserve, has much more bite to it than Zorn's other 2008 foray into easy listening territory, The Dreamers. His Book of Angels series is where he's doing his finest work these days, and this may well be the best installment.

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HONORABLE MENTION
Don Brownrigg – Wander Songs (Weewerk)
Cadence Weapon – After Party Babies (Upper Class)
Glen Campbell – Meet (EMI)
Fairmont – Coloured in Memory (Border Community)
Al Green – Lay It Down (Blue Note)
Clutchy Hopkins – Who is Clutchy Hopkins? (Ubiquity)
Human Highway – Moody Motorcycle (Secret City)
Kocani Orkestar – The Ravished Bride (Crammed)
Mt. Eerie and Julie Doiron – Lost Wisdom (K)
Rural Alberta Advantage – Hometowns (independent)

April/May 08 reviews pt 2

More remnants of spring cleaning today... some of these seem ancient already, despite the fact they're less than two months old.

In further reading, I have a live review of Blue Peter at Lee's Palace last Friday on the Eye Weekly site here. It was my first time seeing one of my favourite Toronto bands of all time; while a fine show, I think I was foolishly expecting so much more. Similarly, Toronto music historians should take note of this show as part of this weekend's Luminato festival: Parachute Club, Mary Margaret O'Hara, Mojah, Lillian Allen, Johnny and the G-Rays and the B-Girls. Congrats to whomever curated this wonderful walk down the Queen Street of 25 years ago, and here's hoping the rain holds out.

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Pas Chic Chic – Au Contraire (Semprini)

French pop gets a bad rap, and often rightfully so. Ever since the glory days of 60s yéyé, it’s been populated with chipper melodies, cooing femme fatales and dated electronics that will never come back in style anywhere else in the world. It’s always held a certain appeal for elements of the rock underground, however, either simply because of Europhilic exoticism or for the way it offers a refracted reflection of English pop music.

Montreal’s Pas Chic Chic give the entire genre a swift kick in the derriere, taking Franco pop’s Farfisa organs and song structures and stripping them of any twee leanings. Instead, they install an amplified arsenal of electric guitars that swirl around the pop melodies and threaten to drench them with droning psychedelics, while the rhythm section dallies back and forth between the dance floor and pummelling their point home. Sometimes that happens in the same song, like the album’s aptly-titled centrepiece, “Vous Comprenez Pourquoi?”, where searing, screeching guitars take over a the harrowing mid-section of a dramatic and driving pop song. Imagine Sonic Youth and Black Mountain bum-rushing the stage at a Belle and Sebastian show.

The members of Pas Chic Chic all hail from noisy backgrounds: founder/guitarist/singer Roger Tellier-Craig caused eardrums to bleed in the abrasive Fly Pan Am and was also in an early version of Godspeed You Black Emperor; guitarist Radwan Moumneh was in hardcore band Cursed. Yet they have no problem creating convincing pop, and their aggression is tempered by keyboardist/vocalist Marie-Douce St. Jacques, whose synthetic strings cast an air of romance over everything.

Even at its most punishing and sinister, Pas Chic Chic manage to convey sentiments of sweetness and hope, when they’re not delivering menace, mystery and melody in equal doses. (K-W Record, April 17)

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Portishead – Third (Universal)

Portishead is not the band you thought they were, and probably never were. And because it's been 11 years since their last album, this is not the time for preconceptions in the first place.

Just because they were the first band to be labeled "trip-hop" doesn't mean that, since the release of their 1994 debut Dummy, Portishead should take the rap for unleashing over a decade of imitators dealing out unadventurous easy listening that's soundtracked every luxury lifestyle ad and lame seduction attempt you've been subjected to ever since.

Portishead was never meant to make you feel comfortable. On the surface, singer Beth Gibbons has a classically beautiful voice, saddled as it is with tragedy. No matter how acute her sense of pain, she is anything but fragile: Gibbons commands a powerful strength, even when it sounds like she's at an emotional breaking point, which is almost always.

Third delves deeper into the increasingly dark territory the band entered on their underrated second album. The soulful underpinnings remain, but much of the hip-hop influence has disappeared—including the trademark turntablism—making room for some of the folkie textures that Gibbons explored in her solo career, as well as the addition of vintage Kraftwerkian synthesizers and dirty drum machines that never fall into cheap electro clichés.

The band themselves seem so eager to kickstart this next phase of their career that they cut off the opening track in mid-phrase, sounding less like a mistake than as if they just want to get on with the rest of the new material, and show off what else they have in store.

What's most remarkable about Third is how this iconic band maintains their signature sound while not repeating themselves in the least. At one point, Gibbons strips everything down to just herself, a mandolin and some doo-wop backing vocals; at another, a Spanish-sounding folk song gives way to pulsating organ drones. Accordions and hurdy-gurdys are just as otherworldly and alien as some of the synths and Theremins; the album closes with wonky cello bends and swooping detuned guitars that sound like lowing cows.

Despite the embarrassment of riches on hand, bandleader Geoff Barrow leaves plenty of sonic space around each element. Even if Gibbons wasn't so compelling, and even if the new songs weren't as strong—if not better—than their best work, this would still be an album you'd want to buy on vinyl and listen to repeatedly with headphones; once through is never enough. (K-W Record, May 8)

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Proof of Ghosts – s/t (Weewerk/Outside)

The suburbs are a lonely place. Just ask singer/songwriter Steve Heyerdahl, who sounds like he strolls endless cul-de-sacs with his banjo in hand, singing laments to lost women and odes to the joys of hanging out by the Slurpee machine on a summer Saturday night.

He does so with haunting vocals that owe a large debt to another singer who pointed out that Everybody Knows This is Nowhere, but more specifically, Heyerdahl falls under the spell of more modern kindred spirits: both his new labelmates the Great Lake Swimmers and his former Oshawa neighbours in Cuff the Duke—opening track “I’m Coming Home” in particular could be an outtake from the latter’s classic album Life Stories for the Minimum Wage.

Oshawa weighs heavy on Heyerdahl throughout this song cycle, not just because he names two songs after the town, but because his brooding country-in-the-city aesthetic suits Durham County to a T: a declining manufacturing town surrounded by a Great Lake and lush farmland. In this setting, Heyerdahl figures that there’s no greater crime than wasting time, and hence “Summer’s Wasted on the Young,” “Time is a Tyrant” and—to cap it off—“Time Takes Its Time.”

Proof of Ghosts is nothing if not consistent: it nails a feeling of torrential ennui that can be crushing and claustrophobic when the album stretches to almost an hour. This recording is mostly a one-man band; no doubt Heyerdahl will make a few more friends and broaden his horizons by the time he heads back into the studio. (K-W Record, April 24)

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R.E.M. – Accelerate (Warner)

A mid-life crisis doesn’t have to be a bad thing. It’s easy to dissect this new R.E.M. album, coming it does after the 25th anniversary of their first EP, a year after they were inducted into the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame, and about ten years after they made an album worth listening to. Last year’s live album found them trying to remember what it was to be a rock band—and clearly, lessons have been learned in the time being.

Now, gone are the lush yet bland Beach Boy-wannabe ballads that they’ve been wallowing in lately. Every song here draws upon the guitar tones that Peter Buck staked his career on in the mid-80s—a signature sound that R.E.M. somehow lost along the way. Also back are the unmistakable backing vocals of bassist Mike Mills, brought to the forefront in ways not heard since 1987’s Life’s Rich Pageant. Singer Michael Stipe has finally got his balls back, both on the fiery rockers and the slower, politically charged tracks; he’s got some grit, and even the most ridiculous lyrics here—found on the apocalyptic party rocker “I’m Gonna DJ”—are considerably more palatable than the parade of shiny happy goof-offs that have snuck on to every R.E.M. album since Green.

It’s hard to say whether our lowered expectations of new R.E.M. material makes Accelerate such an ultimately satisfying listen. While their vintage guitar sound makes a big difference, it’s not necessary—there was plenty of great material dominated by drum machines and keyboards on the underrated 1998 album Up. Back then, losing founding member Bill Berry made them question their future; nowadays, it’s the shadow of irrelevance that has them running scared, in this case back to their roots rather than forging a future. Regardless, it sounds like something is actually at stake for these veterans, and it’s lit a fire behind them to make an album that won’t be littering the second hand store racks a month after its release.

Maybe that Hall of Fame ceremony reminded them that they were always first and foremost a rock band, but when a new R.E.M. record sounds as good as this one it’s best to simply reach for the volume knob and not ponder the reasons why. (K-W Record, April 3)

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Sam Roberts – Love at the End of the World (Maple/Universal)

As you can discern from the title, Sam Roberts’ contribution to your long hot summer soundtrack is a feel-good record about the apocalypse. He claims he’s been “too afraid to read a newspaper,” but clearly the man has a lot on his mind. “There’s blood on these hands” and “the heat is rising,” sings Roberts, on titles like “Stripmall Religion” and “End of the Empire,” not to mention the title track. Yet he’s an optimist at heart, or at least he wants to be: “Life is for the taking,” he insists, adding later, “Just give me a reason for carrying on.”

If he’s feeling the weight of the world, Roberts doesn’t let it bring his music down. Love At the End of the World shows off what years of touring have done for his band, who are moving well beyond their pedestrian beginnings to give Roberts’ songs the colours and dynamics they deserve—to a point, as their aspirations are no more artsy than to be Canada’s finest bar band, which they may well be by now. There’s plenty of the seemingly effortless melodic rock’n’roll that Roberts perfected on his debut EP, without any of the meandering monotonous guitar jams that he sometimes slips into to pad out his lesser songs.

The first single is a bemusing barnburner about how “the kids don’t know how to dance to rock’n’roll,” which manages to be more than just a grumpy old man song; Roberts actually broadens the topic to ask larger questions about the role of artists in general, all set to a boogie-woogie backbeat. Elsewhere, he brings in some subtly psychedelic guitar textures, some stripped down country songs and plenty of rich vocal harmonies to flesh out what is already his strongest set of songs to date.

After all, if the good times are coming to an end, there’s no point settling for less. (K-W Record, May 29)

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She & Him – Volume One (Merge)

Actress Zooey Deschanel is the She in question; renowned guitarist and singer/songwriter M. Ward is the Him. Yet despite his larger profile as a musician, Ward is on hand only to lend instrumental support and arrange Deschanel’s country-tinged songs into 70s pop symphonies worthy of Carly Simon or Carole King. Cast outside of his own hushed folkie material, Ward proves adept at painting with all sorts of sonic colours for these catchy songs. Who knows how long Deschanel has been secretly writing, but she has nine classics here that have a better shot a sliding onto oldies radio than any modern playlist.

The only serious fault here is her voice, which, though pretty enough, is more often than not sounds totally disinterested and devoid of personality—shocking, really, considering her day job in drama. If she’s both actress and screenwriter here, Ward proves to be a great cinematographer; maybe he should be more of a director next time. (K-W Record, April 10)