PortisheadBest Portishead Albums Ranked
8.7
Avg Score
26
Opinions
8
Albums
13
Reviewers
Summary from 26 ratings
On Wavelength, fans have rated Portishead's catalog across 8 albums from 26 opinions, with an overall average of 8.7/10. The top-rated Portishead album is Dummy (1993) with a 8.9/10 average from 12 ratings, followed by Third and Roseland, NYC Live. The discography on Wavelength spans 1993 to 2008. Sour Times ranks as the highest-rated Portishead song on Wavelength with a 10.0/10 average.
Dummy
“Portishead’s 1994 debut is a masterwork of downbeat and desperation. They invented their own kind of virtuosity, one that encompassed musicianship, technology, and aura.”
Third
“As radical reinventions go, Third-- the first Portishead studio album since 1997-- is surprisingly natural. Darker and bleaker lyrically than their previous work, Third is a sort of re-debut-- the band's sound after it has excised every possible remnant of trip-hop from it.”
Dummy
“From tape loops and live strings, Fender Rhodes riffing and angelic singing, these English subversives construct très hip Gothic hip-hop. A junkie for smoky atmosphere, keyboardist Geoff Barrow selects offbeat samples (Johnny Ray, Lalo Schifrin, Wayne Shorter) while Beth Gibbons croons through the intentional murk, copping glamorous Astrud Gilberto attitude. Songs like "Roads," "Glory Box" […]”
Third
“It’s been ten years since the world last heard from Portishead, the U.K. trip-hop trio, and they do not sound like they’ve spent the past decade going to therapy, listening to new music or making friends. Actually, they sound like they spent it locked in a tea cupboard underwater off the coast of Bristol, with […]”
PNYC
“This exceptional concert recording dramatizes how the musical goals that drive this Bristol, England, quartet eclipse anything as fleeting as trip-hop (that most stupid of Nineties pop coinages). Mostly recorded at New York’s Roseland Ballroom on July 24th, 1997, these songs find the group’s soprano center, Beth Gibbons, applying her featherweight gravity to subjects like […]”
Portishead
“Portishead’s mix of ’60s soundtrack music, hip-hop beats, dub and detached female vocals became an instant reference point when their first album, Dummy, came out, in 1994. Three years later, with the very first notes of Portishead, the group easily re-establishes its mastery of the genre now known as trip-hop. Instrumentalists Geoff Barrow and Adrian […]”
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