Michael Abernethy - The Homegrown Snob

Music nerds love difficult records.

It’s become cliche: Pick the most obtuse, awkward-sounding combination of sounds and snobs will gobble it up and hail it as “Best Album of the Millennium!” or “Most Fantastical Thing Ever Conceived.”

It’s sad but true.

I’m guessing this began sometime in the 1950s, during the Beat movement. That’s when intellectualism trumped plot and substance, and when over-hyped writers like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg spewed their every thought onto the page to have it snatched up by a nation of think-too-hard-ers. I’m not saying they weren’t innovative or talented. I’m just saying that they were praised for being terribly egocentric and pointing out the obvious in overly difficult ways.

Well, OK, so it probably started way before that (Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Joyce, William Faulkner) but I’m too lazy to trace pop culture back that far.

Back to the point.

Of course there’s the long-standing (not untrue) belief that anything worth having is worth working for. The same goes for music.

I’ve practiced a theory that an album should be listened to at least five times before you form an opinion of it. Some of the greatest songs ever written won’t reveal themselves to you on the first spin (The Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows,” Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” The Smiths’ entire catalogue). Some of the best albums will grow with you.

Given time, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without them. That goes against the foundation of pop music: immediate, digestible, hummable tunes.

Some of my favorite albums have been the “difficult” ones. Radiohead’s OK Computer short-circuited my brain the first time I heard it. It took me weeks to wrap my head around it. Now it sounds tame. Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot sounded like Jeff Tweedy put the microphones inside a vacuum cleaner when he recorded his best songs.

Portishead is among these chiefest of difficult bands.

The band’s music is bleak, claustrophobic and often feels aimless, but it’s oddly beautiful, too.

Quick primer: Portishead sprang out of nowhere in 1994 with the album Dummy and the inescapable “Sour Times,” that sounded like a James Bond theme on lithium. Three troubled years later, they followed that up with an even bigger bummer: their self-titled, scratchily sampled 1997 album.

During those three or four years, they rivaled Radiohead in their sense of paranoia and despair at the world. But where Radiohead turned its frustration outward to socio-political themes, Portishead played it close to the heart.

Beth Gibbon’s fractured vocals (a fun-house-mirror image of Billie Holiday) sat uneasily atop the sampled strings and scratched beats. The three-piece never really changed its modus operandi, just tweaked it a bit as the ’90s came to a close.

Then they disappeared.

A couple weeks ago, the band released its most troubling record to date, simply titled Third.

Portishead recorded this album in fits over the last 11 years and it sounds like it. Glacial splices of synthesizer interrupt melodies. Songs abruptly end. Tempos change without warning. Some songs seem nearly unlistenable.

But at the same time, there’s a compelling bleakness to the mix.

When Gibbons sings about being rescued by white horses on “The Rip,” (a contender for best Portishead song ever) you can’t tell if she’s praying for it or dreading it - as if the other place they’d taker her to would be worse than this one.

About a month ago, they released “Machine Gun” as the album’s first single.

If you ever wondered what it sounded like to drown in a Russian submarine, you’ve got your answer. After four minutes of an undending barrage of a repeated sample of a skull-crushing beat, almost anything seems sunny.

Anything but state meetings about the Jordan Lake Rules.

Spinning this album for several hours in the car, to and from the state government complex in Raleigh, this album touched me in a way not dissimilar to state legislation: Cold and calculated. Removed from normalcy. A miscarriage of sanity.

I can’t say I love this album, but I’m certainly intrigued by it. I’ve definitely never heard anything quite like it.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 9th, 2008 at 8:23 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.