Dummy [VINYL]

Product Information

In “Mysterons,” the looped snare rolls sound like a steel trap snapping shut and being pried back open in quick succession. The only thing missing for me is the lyrics sheet, but that's not a factor when considering the purchase. for those that don't like this pressing, I am pretty sure you don't have this pressing but one of a dozen lesser copies that have made their way around. Dummy' helped synthesize a new sound that became essential to the Bristol scene, coinciding with bands such as Massive Attack to put West Country trip-hop on the map.

A few fuzzy sibilants in Wandering Star (last track on side A), as is sometimes the case with last tracks near the centre of the record, but nothing major or out of the ordinary to detract from the quality of the music.

In my last comment I noted that I received two of disc 1 in my sealed release instead of a disc 1 and a disc 2. Dummy’s closest antecedent was Massive Attack’s Blue Lines, and not by coincidence: Barrow had worked as an errand boy and tape op in Bristol’s Coach House Studios while that record was being made.

A5 contains portions of "Magic Mountain" as performed by [Invalid Artist] courtesy of Avenue Records / Polygram Music Publishing. Some lines stand out as clearly as dog-eared diary entries: “Give me a reason to love you/Give me a reason to be a woman”; “Nobody loves me, it’s true/Not like you do”; “How can it feel this wrong?

But this pressing really throws it in my face, and its hard to enjoy the music once you've heard it once. I highly recommend to get this record, it has good mixing, good pressing and is an all-around great album. It’s possible to hear in Dummy a collection of gratifyingly sad-but-sexy gestures, and plenty of Portishead’s followers—Lamb, Morcheeba, Olive, Alpha, Mono, Hooverphonic, Sneaker Pimps, and dozens of other acts forever lost to the cut-out bin of history—did just that. Not quite a band, hardly a strictly electronic project, they had to invent their own kind of virtuosity, one that encompassed musicianship, technology, and aura.

Dummy arrived at a moment when young people were craving soundtracks for the comedown—but what happens when you follow Portishead all the way down, as far as they want to take us? A routinely great artist, much of Sufjan's universal appeal comes from his skills as a gifted narrator, pairing personal musings on love and devotion with commentary on American culture, whilst welding folk and electronica, the ambient and existential. Track A5: Contains portions of " Magic Mountain" as performed by Eric Burdon and WAR courtesy of Avenue Records / Polygram Music Publishing. Their core lineup consisted of Geoff Barrow, a 22-year-old hip-hop fan obsessed with turntable alchemy; Adrian Utley, a 37-year-old jazz guitarist looking for a way out of the 20th century; and Beth Gibbons, a 29-year-old singer who’d grown up on a farm and, prior to Portishead, had “probably done more singing in her bedroom than on stage,” Barrow reckoned. All tracks recorded at State of Art and Coach House Studios, Bristol, with additional mixing at Moles Studio, Bath.Though the LPs won’t include any additional material (“with the songs remaining exactly as recorded on the original release”), each copy will include a download card of the original album. Despite her convincing air of sorrow, she’s a knowing, playful singer, capable of shifting emotional registers on a dime, cycling through moods—jazzy and coquettish, grimly resigned, wild with grief—like a housefly tracing squares in empty space. For "Glory Box", most booklets claim Isaac Hayes'"Ikes Rap III" as sample source, but actually it's a sample from "Ikes Rap II" that is used (the same sample Tricky used on "Hell Is Round the Corner").