Yahoo! Music Review

Gig played on 17/04/08

People who don't like Portishead sneeringly dismiss them as dinner party music, something the sickening middle class stick on in the background while they discuss worthy subjects over fine wines. But you have to wonder if these critics have actually ever properly listened to Portishead. What kind of dinner party is soundtracked by the extremes of melancholy and despair that poured out of Beth Gibbons during the '90s (the woman, lest you forget, who rhymed lonely with unholy, and made both sound like the end of existence)? The Last Supper perhaps?

Still, the dinner party tag stuck, and Portishead found themselves sidelined when they should have been revered alongside the likes of Billie Holiday. They also found themselves backed into a corner, stuck with the Portishead formula - cinematic strings, spaghetti western guitar, light hip hop beats and scratching, and pain in freefall courtesy of Gibbons. And while that distinct style still sends rapture sparking through the venue like electricity tonight, it's the moments when they break free of that formula, when they reveal that after 15 years and three albums they're only just hitting their creative peak, that really excite.

"Machine Gun". You must have heard it by now. The song that explodes the Portishead template in an instant. Chances are, you don't like it - harsh, atonal, industrial, it's seemingly everything they shouldn't be. And yet dropped amongst the precise atmospherics of "Dummy" like a splinter bomb, it makes perfect sense. It blows the doors off. It blows the walls off. And after that, the band can go anywhere. They can build folky atmospherics to a swinging, surging crescendo. They can delight in instinctive, fluid, avant rhythms and sounds. They can, in effect, pick up where Radiohead left off with "In Rainbows".

Brilliantly, they bring this experimental approach to their past work. "Wandering Star", Yahoo! Music's personal favourite, is transformed, stripped back to pulsing bass, touches of guitar, and Beth's voice, making, if such a thing is possible, an already supremely bleak song feel deliciously bleaker. When she sings, "Wandering stars, for whom it is reserved, the blackness of darkness forever", voice to the fore, infinity behind her, the last thing on your mind is what you might be having for the next course.

Of course, the old material is still magnificent. It always was. The crowd cheer the jagged noir of the guitar in "Sour Times", catch their breath when Beth howls "Give me a reason to love you", that startling voice soaring and fading like an echo from a far-off time. And, naturally, Beth being Beth, she clutches onto her mic stand at the very end, and apologises for everything. "Sorry, I sounded terrible tonight", she gushes. But she's wrong. She sounded spectacular.

by Ian Watson