Portishead in NY Times

By far one of my favorite groups for various reasons (thanks Moto and Wu Tang), I was on my daily blog run (exercise your mind please) and ran across this. Good read about who they are and where they have been. I can remember going through rabid internet searches, trying to find any inklings of new material from them. I did bump into the Beth Gibbons & Rustin Man project, which was dope in it own way but far from the P. This article also throws out some good info about a project that did with James Skelley that I will have to check out. Here it the first few paragraphs. Click the link for the full article and clips from their new project, "Third".

After a Decade Away, Portishead Floats Back (NY TIMES)
By JON PARELES

GEOFF BARROW has an objective for his band, Portishead. He wants it to be “the opposite of rock ’n’ roll,” even if he hasn’t entirely figured out what that is. After all, it was a taste of the rock ’n’ roll life that made Portishead disappear for a decade while the band’s otherworldly mixture of modern dread, retro samples and torch-song yearning lingered on soundtracks and boutique playlists.

On the two morosely startling albums that made Portishead’s reputation when it came out of England in the 1990s, Beth Gibbons’s voice and words were bereft and bitter, floating in music that placed vintage samples in sparse, echoey backdrops, conjuring emotional abysses and the irrevocable passage of time. The band itself was self-effacing, but word of mouth, from introvert to introvert, worked as much as radio play to cultivate devoted fans. According to Nielsen SoundScan, Portishead’s debut album, “Dummy,” sold 1.1 million copies and its second, “Portishead,” sold 635,000. Then, after touring and a live follow-up album, Portishead faded out.
Now Portishead has rematerialized, resuming a career that has always moved in slow motion. “It’s amazing how quickly 10 years can go,” said Adrian Utley, who plays guitars and keyboards, over coffee at an elegant Munich hotel the night before the band’s performance. “There was no sense that we would split up or we weren’t going to do anything again. We just didn’t want to for that time.”

Read the rest here...