Glory Box

Hey!

After some thinking, I decided I will use the track "Eliza" to recreate in the downtempo genre. More specifically, 1990s trip-hop! And EVEN more specifically, like Portishead and Massive Attack. I don't know what it is about the genre and their songs (from their respective albums "Dummy" and "Mezzanine") that have me so hooked recently - maybe it's the repetitive bass or the dramatic drums - but I am excited to try and recreate "Eliza" in their signature style. The reason I chose "Eliza" to recreate was because of the female vocals... it reminded me heavily of Beth Gibbons, who was the vocalist for Portishead's song "Glory Box", hence, that will be the track I am going to analyse and reference!

With "Glory Box" being one of the top songs in the 90s, it's easy to see why people loved it so much - basically paving the way for trip-hop as a genre (even though the band always disliked the term due to categorizing their music) and hitting the top 10 in charts worldwide. "Glory Box" was released on 26th September 1994 and is the third song on their album "Dummy" and was written by Isaac Hayes and produced by Adrian Utley, both from Portishead, as said on Wikipedia (2024). It features a sample from "Ike's Rap II" also by Isaac Hayes.

The production of "Glory Box" (and, actually, the whole album "Dummy") was really unique in the sense of texturing and sampling. Fumo explains Geoff Barrow's inventive approach to sampling - he would have recorded drum loops pressed to vinyl before scratching it by kicking it about. He would then scratch specifically the snare drum bit to make it much duller. The grooves of the vinyl would then be played and sampled, programmed into beats and processed further during mixing. They also bounced their mixes to cassette a lot, which compressed and distorted the mixes in a way, and this was how they got the thin, mellotron-like strings on "Glory Box". Another creative technique used on "Dummy" was to re-amp the drums through a practice amp to achieve a more distorted and more "live" feel, but I will get into that in a later post.

This post is very limited in specific information, as I plan to go into more depth in future posts when planning to record the bass, drums, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, vocals and potentially piano. 

Goodbye for now,

-D.