Portishead
Roseland New York (Island) Watching and listening to this five-year-old Portishead performance from the fabled Roseland ballroom in NYC is an awful lot like watching them live anywhere, which is either good or bad depending on your idea of what a live performance should be. There’s little to no variation in the trip-hoppy beats of Geoff Barrow and Beth Gibbons’ smoky chanteusery, and fans of the band looking for a new P experience are going to have to search hard for anything they don’t already have in their CD collections. With that in mind, the DVD’s production is uniformly excellent. Multiple cameras snake their way through the band’s stage set on Roseland’s hardwood floors with the audience contemplatively seated in a semi-circle around them, tracking up close and personal as Gibbons undulates her way through all the hits — “Sour Times,” “Cowboys,” “Glory Box” — and Barrow manipulates the sinewy narcotic groove around the audience, who nod appreciatively and occasionally appear ready for a nap. And Portishead’s sleepytime beats can do that to the best of us; this is music — beautiful music — that seems to have wandered in out of a dark alley clutching a handful of wilted posies. Better than the live set is the inclusion of the band’s videos, including “Numb” and “All Mine,” plus a trio of “short films” (more like videos), including the little-seen “To Kill a Dead Man.” Dinner-party background ambience or sparing score to your next night-tide grope session? Ah, decisions, decisions.This article appears in June 28 • 2002.