Portishead vs. Tindersticks

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the Gloomydrome. This week two titans of tristfulness have drawn swords after a combined sixteen years of inactivity, two monsters of melancholia have lined up their newest songs and released, quite coincidentally on the same day, two albums of deepest desolation, facing off, in sadiatorial combat if you will, for the title of Most Miserable Band In Britain. Let’s meet the contenders.

In the blue corner: Portishead. A band so paralysed by depression that it took them eleven years to get Third, their imaginatively-named third album, onto tape. They toured their last effort to dismal places like Bridlington, forcing skint student fans to burn up valuable beer money staying in grimy B&Bs on the North Sea coast during the off season to further enhance the bleak experience of their music. Yes, I was there, and with a memorably monumental hangover after being the most drunk I’ve ever been too, but that’s another story for another day.

In the other blue corner: Tindersticks. A band whose most cheerful tune tells a story containing two dead people, a dead cat, GBH, paraplegia, blindness, parental abandonment, statutory rape, and a PE teacher. They’re so miserable, three of them didn’t even turn up to record their current album, The Hungry Saw. I once cleared a party in under thirty seconds with this music, music that sounds like the bar band on a dreadnought of despair, solemnly sailing an ocean of tiny tears towards the sunset of autumnal regret and… I’m sorry, got a little carried away there, but you catch my drift. They’re pretty miserable too.

Let battle commence!

Tindersticks are off to an understated start with what sounds like a clinically depressed toy piano followed by a meditation on ageing and decay called Yesterday’s Tomorrows, whereas Portishead have apparently summoned the unquiet spirit of Lorca to introduce their surprisingly fast first number, Silence. It sounds like a reanimated Cuban zombie lounge jazz. The ‘Sticks dodge nimbly with a defiantly cheerful tune about youth, which serves to heighten the impact when they plunge us directly back into the depths. Their fancy footwork comes to naught, though, in the face of two haymakers from the Bristolians: Hunter features synths that Radiohead rejected from Kid A for being a bit too upsetting, and Nylon Smile opens with the unmatchable lines:

I’d like to laugh at what you said
but I just can’t find a smile…

Beth Gibbons sounds like she spent her entire childhood dropping ice-cream cones and stepping on Lego bricks. Tindersticks are on their back foot here, and are reduced to marking time with an instrumental before getting a good one in with the splendid lament of The Other Side Of The World: it appears that Stuart Staples is so sad that his lady has taken herself off to Australia to get as far away from his moaning as possible.

Geoff Barrow and co. dodge smoothly aside with The Rip, all jangly guitars and arpeggios and lyrics about white horses. It’s almost chipper, but they’re just lulling their opponents into a false sense of slightly less-than-utter despair preparatory to unleashing their robotic armies of doom in We Carry On, a veritable wall of mechanistic misery.

Half-time, and both contenders are exhausted by their exertions, so Tindersticks provide a little light diversion with The Organist Entertains. Portishead respond with a ukulele-backed song about Beth Gibbons being scared of swimming, but they just can’t resist mixing in an undead barbershop quartet to remind us that they are all serious, all the time. And just in case we didn’t get the message, they resume hostilities immediately, only this time each troop in their robot soldier battalion is packing a Machine Gun.

Stuart Staples’ boys are unfazed by this display of miltary-grade misery, however, and swing back onto the field in style with The Hungry Saw, where love is open-heart surgery, and the surgeon is none other than Old Nick himself, followed by the astonishing Mother Dear, a song so heart-rending that Neil Fraser actually forgets how to play his guitar half way though.

Mother dear, the sky is falling through this night,
I am crawling around, I need the sound of your heart.

But it is not enough. The final quarter of Portishead’s record is gloriously glum, three songs of total despondency, and whilst Tindersticks maintain their defence admirably with some smashing bittersweet laments for lost love and regrets unresolved, victory remains beyond their reach. Barrow, Gibbons and Utley are undeniably supreme masters of the morose. Tindersticks sound like men who have seen trouble, oh you don’t know the trouble, and are holding things together with nothing more than fancy alcohol, expensive tobacco products, and black humour, but at the end of these two records there is one clear winner: with Third Portishead have proved themselves to be The Most Miserable Band In Britain, and by some considerable distance. If you thought that their second album was a bit on the dark side, you’re in for a shock. Their latest makes Dummy sound like Abba Gold. Frankly, I’m a bit worried about them, and I’m wondering whether we should perhaps send them some Beach Boys records, or maybe a Bill Bailey DVD, to cheer them up a bit.

Both albums are utterly brilliant though, you should definitely buy them to give your inner angsty teenager something to sulk to for a while. And now I’m off to listen to something a bit more cheerful, like Bonnie Prince Billy or Joy Division.

2 comments 2008-05-04 10:14 Categories: Music, Reviews