Never really bought the hubbub surrounding Portishead and Dummy. Whereas Massive Attack were creative in ways beyond restriction, seamlessly melding electronic music, hip hop, lounge, soul, industrial, and rock, Portishead is content with wallowing in an update of blues and lounge music. And they aren’t even very good at it. The beats are completely basic and the other instrumentation is so dry that tracks lack memorable melodies or ways to discern them from one another. Song structures are all exactly the same and lack tempo variety.

Dummy‘s a one-trick pony that subverted elements of music rather than evolving them. Beth Gibbons is the only thing keeping this album afloat, and since my preferred Out of Season exists, there’s no reason for me to stick to Dummy. I love trip hop, but Portishead have been copied hundreds of times with better songwriters who had more creative ambition. Dummy isn’t eerie or mysterious, it’s dry, empty, and repetitive.