Editor’s Note: Our new, recurring “Albumism Recommends” series aims to shine a bright light on our favorite albums of the past, with an emphasis on the records that arguably never achieved the widespread or sustained attention they rightfully deserve. As you’ll see below, unlike our longer-form feature articles, we’ve intentionally kept the accompanying commentary to a minimum, so as to allow the great music to speak for itself.

We hope that you enjoy discovering (or rediscovering) these musical treasures and if you like what you hear, we encourage you to spread the good word far and wide so that others can experience these under-the-radar classics as well.

Though nearly twenty years have elapsed, I still vividly recall that autumn evening back in October of 2003, when my friend Veronica and I witnessed Beth Gibbons & Rustin Man’s magnificent performance at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn. Just as hauntingly beautiful on stage as heard on the duo’s collaborative album Out of Season (2002), the elegiac, exquisitely crafted songs delivered by the Portishead vocalist and Talk Talk co-founder/bassist Paul Webb that night moved my companion—and I suspect many others assembled in the crowd—to tears.

Recorded and released during the extended intervening period between Portishead’s eponymous second studio album Portishead (1997) and appropriately titled Third (2008), Out of Season offers melancholic meditations alongside more wistful soliloquies, with Gibbons’ singular voice thrust to the forefront atop sweeping, orchestral and acoustic soundscapes. Full of understated charms that reveal themselves anew with repeated listens, Out of Season is an intimately poignant yet powerful testament to Gibbons and Webb’s creative symbiosis.

ALSO RECOMMENDED:

Portishead’s Dummy (1994)
Portishead’s Roseland NYC Live (1998)

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