Sour Times

This live video of Portishead from the recent War Child UK Benefit Concert is absolutely gut-wrenching. The fragility of Beth Gibbons’ pitch-imperfect voice. The poignant pauses of Geoff Barrow’s drumming. The nonchalance of Adrian Utley’s strumming and monotonal knob-twiddling. Twenty-five years after their prime output, this core group of paunchy melancholics has lost none of its punch, shamanic sounds reverberating sourer than ever, an atonal tonic for these trying times.