The strangest thing about Portishead‘s first proper New York set in forever–nearly 15 years if you can believe it–wasn’t when an otherwise stoic Beth Gibbons lunged at the crowd and high-fived fans. We’ll get to that in a second; what really caught us off guard was how loud the trio can be live. Having only heard, not seen, their string-swept Roseland NYC album, we expected some brushes with brutality (the steam-powered drum pads of “Machine Gun,” the shrill, doom-laden choruses of “Cowboys”) but not jarring, jagged details like the turntable stabs that throttled the prickly peaks of “Glory Box.” Hearing that without a pair of earplugs on is enough to make you step back a bit. Or at least realize that Gibbons isn’t messing around. Not when she’s got Adrian Utley chopping up chords on one side and Geoff Barrow exercising his more experimental tendencies on the other.
At any rate, the following clip–an extended, groove-locked version of “We Carry On”–is from the end of last night’s Hammerstein Ballroom show, a triumphant coda that included Gibbons at her most playful…
