quote:

....The quieter reunions this year were those of Swervedriver and Love and Rockets; the more significant one was Portishead, reunited after 10 years, which played a mesmerizing set on Saturday. (The main stage at Coachella in the evening is one of the glories of concertgoing in America: enormous sound, ample space, desert air.)

Reconfigured as a six-piece live band, with Geoff Barrow playing turntables and percussion; Adrian Utley on guitar; and Beth Gibbons singing tempest-tossed, unanswerable challenges and declarations of failure (“I’m tired!” she screamed in “Threads,” “I’m worn!”), Portishead was both minimal and maximal. This band runs on its ebb-tide mood, but also on composition and concision. Mr. Utley, in particular, played no notes that weren’t absolutely necessary — something very rare for a front-line instrument in any music — and the live show exposed the symmetry between Ms. Gibbons’s quavering voice and the songs’ queasy keyboard tones.