I for one can't disassociate this album from that era and Trip-Hop as a form of "PC" Hip-Hop for people with then new and interesting jobs like web designers and trendy noodle-bars muzak. In USA, I guess this was more underground and FAR less successful than "regular" Hip.Hop but amongst 90's hipsters in sweden, that was SO not the case.

For example, I remember this dude I went to highschool with who was all about detroit-techno and house and he used to refer to Hip-Hop as "pek-neger" music (=ignorant swedish term for Hip-Hop; the rappers are black and they are "pointing" with their hands). Fast forward a year or two and he was spinning Trip-hop and Mo'wax and Ninja Tune in "cool" bars but bring up Gang Starr or Wu-Tang or DITC or whoever and it was still "ignorant macho music" to him whereas Portishead and their colleagues approach to Hip-Hop beats were correct and non-offensive.

Anyway, I liked this album for a few weeks in 95 but the general vibe and aesthetic it set off kind of pissed me off after a while; it's perfectly possible-even likely-that my view is clouded by non-musical circumstances but at the same time, music does not exist in a vacuum and the vibe/aesthetic/whatever that "Dummy" represents to me (=90's anglophile hipster muzak) is not one I'm interested in revisiting. At all. Maybe a decade from now...

That being said, USA wasn't really anglophilic and obsessed with the latest british hype like that then so I can see why people hear it differently; to *me*, this is a time-period relic best forgotten, like Huey Lewis&the News or Eurythmics or Poison in the 80's...