WOWEE ZOWEE (3)

By: Mark Kingwell
January 17, 2018

One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the subject of our favorite albums of the Nineties (1994–2003). A new installment in this series will appear each Wednesday during 2018.

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DUMMY | PORTISHEAD | 1994

Well, it’s obviously a superb makeout album, offering for a younger generation what Al Green’s combined 1971–73 output accomplished for an older one. Under the right circumstances, when someone pressed play on track one, “Mysterons,” the haunting opening notes, turntable squawks and soft hoots of Beth Gibbons’s seductive voice signaled fifty minutes of happy.

You could even argue that the album is a sort of makeout primer, a musical how-to guide. Rising and falling through ten tracks, with changes of tone, mood, pace, and tension, it teaches you how to listen to it even as it offers a readymade intimacy cocoon. Horns and strings, or electronic versions thereof, make what should be incongruous audio landfall, but somehow cohere with the rolling trippy lushness. Scratches, pops, hisses and snare-drum effects pulse the songs into a seamless whole: I never listened to anything except the whole album.

But it wasn’t all kisses and caresses. The lyrics of this astonishing debut are as melancholy and devastating as anything from the downbeat Nineties. In the period just after the album was released, I was labouring on a book about the outbursts of existential dread and fearsome apocalyptic imagery that visit every culture as it approaches a millennial endgame, real or imagined. I was also languishing in the nether regions of academic life, lurching zombie-like from sessional contract to temporary lectureship, trying desperately to write my way out of career limbo and a failing marriage. Dummy was the perfect penumbral soundtrack for my daily bouts of melancholy, punctuated with riffs of anger, frustration and, occasionally, foolish hope.

It all worked itself out, as things will. I finished the book. The year 2000 came and went with no hails of fire or global computer crashes. I even managed to get a secure job. Meanwhile, this musical Freudian hour of note-perfect expression lives on, renewed over and over by our own unreliable, necessary, plaintive desires.

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WOWEE ZOWEE: Stephanie Burt on UNISEX | Anindita Basu Sempere on UNDER THE PINK | Mark Kingwell on DUMMY | Bill Nericcio on AMOR PROHIBIDO | Sherri Wasserman on HIPS AND MAKERS | Mimi Lipson on THANK YOU | John Overholt on BEN FOLDS FIVE | Jordan Ellenberg on GET LOST | Chelsey Johnson on PERSONAL BEST | Marilyn Snell on MAXINQUAYE | Dan Fox on DIFFERENT CLASS | Devin McKinney on IF YOU’RE FEELING SINISTER | Alice Boone on MTV UNPLUGGED (ALICE IN CHAINS) | Rob Wringham on SPICE | Joe Alterio on BEATS, RHYMES AND LIFE | Jason Loeffler on SECOND TOUGHEST IN THE INFANTS | Rick Pinchera on EITHER/OR | Josh Glenn on THE LONESOME CROWDED WEST | Jennifer Krasinski on SUPA DUPA FLY | Sara Ryan on DIG ME OUT | Luc Sante on MEZZANINE | Molly Wright Steenson on I CAN HEAR THE HEART BEATING AS ONE | Franklin Bruno on ENGLAND MADE ME | Michael Campochiaro on IS THIS DESIRE? | Adrienne Crew on CALIFORNICATION | Drew Daniel on I SEE A DARKNESS | Veda Hille on THE SOFT BULLETIN | Vanessa Berry on TEENAGE SNUFF FILM | Tom Kipp on GET SKINTIGHT | David Hirmes on DOPETHRONE | John Hilgart on YORK BLVD. | Deborah Wassertzug on JOURNEY TO THE END OF THE NIGHT | Adam McGovern on INVINCIBLE SUMMER | Brian Berger on TIRED SOUNDS OF… | Michael Grasso on MUSIC HAS THE RIGHT TO CHILDREN | Jen Collins on HURRAH | Flourish Klink on THE TEACHES OF PEACHES | Judith Zissman on TALLAHASSEE | Lauren Oliver on SOUND-DUST | Jason Cohen on IS THIS IT | Matthew De Abaitua on THE RAINBOW CHILDREN | Jenny Davidson on TIME (THE REVELATOR) | Crystal Durant on LIVE THROUGH THIS | Gordon Dahlquist on GARBAGE | Erin M. Routson on WASHING MACHINE | Carl Wilson on TEMPTING | Jessamyn West on ALL HAIL WEST TEXAS | Kaleb Horton on STREETCORE | Tom Nealon on BAZOOKA TOOTH | Erik Davis on DOPESMOKER | David Levine on FEVER TO TELL | Deb Chachra on MASS ROMANTIC.

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Categories

Enthusiasms, Pop Music