Portishead by The Velvet Librarian

The Velvet Librarian is the inaugural voter for the Best Albums of All Time, with this list:
1. Portishead / Portishead
2. Spleen and Ideal / Dead Can Dance
3. OK Computer / Radiohead
4. Twice Upon a Time : The Singles / Siouxsie and the Banshees
5. Cranes / Forever
6. Mezzanine / Massive Attack
7. Treasure / Cocteau Twins
8. Dresden Dolls / Dresden Dolls
9. Dummy / Portishead
10. It'll end in tears / This Mortal Coil

The Velvet Librarian has this to say about Portishead by Portishead (pic from allmusic.com):










Beth Gibbon's voice, emerging from the sound of scratchy vinyl is the sound of smoke and despair. She snarls her tortured lyrics, like a desperate 1950's niteclub chantuse. There's a meticulousness about the sound of the album that's hard to define, but completely perfect, like someone tapped your brain, and distilled everything you loved about old movie soundtracks, femme fatales, spy movies and moulded it into a bunch of hazy torch songs, so perfect you can't diassociate it from those times when you thought everything bad. The antidote to such depression was listening to Portishead, because in their world everything is at the brink of disaster, its reassuring to find that indeed things can be worse, but also for every disaster, there is a glimmer of dirty beauty.

Thanks, TVL, there's more to come from him in the future.