GEOFF BARROW & BEN SALISBURY / Drokk: Music Inspired by Mega-City One [2012]

2012 was a busy year for Portishead's Geoff Barrow with his side-projects Beak> and Quakers releasing full-lengths I don't know where he found the time to work with composer Ben Salisbury as well. 

Drokk: Music inspired by Mega-City One is what I suspect Barrow & Salisbury intended to be the score for Pete Travis' Dredd film before Paul-Leonard Morgan took over composing duties.  Rather than acknowledging the film, the duo opted to draw inspiration from Mega-City One of the comic books with a cold-hearted John Carpenter-esque blanket of menacing synth cues.  Drokk does nothing to hide it's '80's darkwave influences and relies heavily on throbbing arpeggiators, fuzzy synth strikes and stroboscopic drones spiraling in and out laying down an immensely unsettling atmosphere that threatens to suffocate with paranoid claustrophobia.

3½ Escapes from drokking Mega-City out of 5

Songs of Note: Helmet Theme; Exhale

BEAK> / >> [2012]

With his acclaimed hip-hop project Quakers and non-existant Judge Dredd film score project Drokk under his wing from earlier this year, Portishead's Geoff Barrow returns to his other experimental side-project Beak> for 2012's curiously titled >>.

Widely described as Barrow's love letter to Krautrock, the album is a muffled journey in late-nite madness with analog synths, roughly programmed loops and nearly indecipherable lyrics.  It sounds like a audio-nerd's nightmare and it is, which makes all the more haunting, bleak and claustrophobic.  It's a little more defined and smoothed out compared to their first album but it doesn't take away from the hypnotizing creepiness of their already established sound.  

4 nods to Neu! out of 5

Songs Of Note: Yatton; Deserters

QUAKERS / Quakers [2012]

You're Geoff Barrow and your band, Portishead has a rough time getting off it's ass and making a new album.  So what do you do?  You create some side-projects to pass the time.  One is spiratic trip-hoppers Beak>, another is the Judge Dredd inspired Drokk and the other is 2012's hip-hop group Quakers.

Recruiting an army of well-known acts and lesser known unsigned MySpace artists to lay their voices over Barrows & Co.'s 41 rhythms and backbeats, Quakers is a huge project that could have easily been a complete disaster.  Fortunately that isn't the case here.  Not a moment is wasted and there's no single input phoned in by the contributor.  It's all by artists who are genuinely in love with their craft and are damned good at what they do.  

4 Radioheads out of 5

Songs Of Note: Fitta Happier; Dark City Lights