What a defiantly strange album Portishead's Geoff Barrow has made here. Beak> sounds like almost nothing else going around in 2009, though admittedly some of it sounds an awful lot like 1971. It's menacing and even potentially alienating. It's a work of loving pastiche with none of the deadening, touchy-feely hesitancy you can get when musicians attempt to wrestle with their heroes and wind up embarrassed by their own hubris halfway through the process.
Beak> is off the cuff in the best sense, a burst of itchy inspiration. Many of the same influences colored Portishead's Third, but Beak> unshackle them from singer and song structure, gaining intensity for what it loses in memorability. There's a ruthlessness to Barrow's writing here, especially in regards to rhythm. Barrow understands the appeal of Can in full-tilt flow-motion far better than the average band who earns the comparison because they swipe a Jaki Liebezeit drum pattern every now again
But while the stamp of Cologne's finest is all over Beak>-- mixed with a little Neu! on "Iron Action"-- Barrow's more interested in figuring out what gave Can's records their vibe, rather than Xeroxing their jams. "Pill" evokes that classic krautrock feeling of wandering clammy castle halls, getting dripped on by condensation as you try to find the band you could swear you heard jamming on one fierce, hypnotic note. All the vocals on Beak> seem to emanate from the far end of one of those hallways, like the mumbly moans of "I Know", vocals that don't suggest dread or terror so much as a low-grade but fully saturated eeriness. There's something plain off about Beak's tense vibe -- a creepy hollowing-out of rock's usual boundless energy.
In one sense it's a vibe not so far removed from Portishead proper, minus Beth Gibbons' drama-queening. But it's hard to imagine Portishead ever writing "Ham Green", which noodles for a while before dropping the boom with 1970s doom metal's "let's drink Cisco by the train tracks and call it a seance" camp menace, funny and coarse in a way you just don't associate with the trio that made Barrow famous. Of course, Beak> don't have Portishead's moments of mannered majesty, either. There's certainly nothing as emotionally overwhelming as "The Rip" on Beak>, and compared to Third, this is obviously the "lesser" work.
But that looseness and liberating inconsequentiality is kind of the point. You're getting Barrow's obsessions here, unfiltered, and Beak> is as full of odd, compulsive energy as you'd expect from something cranked out in two weeks, made by a guy who probably had creative fuel to burn, considering that his day job took 11 years between their second and third albums. This is Barrow off the leash and free to chase the beat.
