Portishead: To Kill A Dead Man

 

In 1994 Bristolian downtempo band Portishead (Beth Gibbons, Adrian Utley & Geoff Barrow) created a short film To Kill A Dead Man.
Its premise - "An assassin kills a man from a rooftop and the traumatized wife of the victim is hospitalized. But is everything as it seems?"
Its style part film noir thriller, part fever dream

The coupling of a 1990s British electronic group and 1940s American hardboiled movies may seem an odd coupling but it is a perfect match - the jazz samples and downbeat melancholia of Portishead's sound and the cold sinister atmosphere of the postwar crime cinema meld perfectly. The union produces a strange, sinister aesthetic and unsurprisingly the band find a fan in the artist and film director David Lynch.

Though working together for over three decades, Portishead are not the most prolific band, releasing only 3 albums in that time but each of those records are classics so quality rather than quantity.