6. Portishead - Third

I first heard Portishead about 8 years back, a few years after their seminal sophomore album. I had no idea then that their unique brand of sample-heavy music was called trip hop; and in light of the retrospect offered by Third - their third album after an 11-year wait - the tag was somewhat misleading. Though Portishead were often compared alongside compatriots such as Massive Attack, Amon Tobin and Tricky, the truth is they never operated within the confines of the genre. On Third, they all but shed the noirish style completely; and sound simply like Portishead - inventive, experimental, startlingly original with a fondness for psychedelia and krautrock.
Despite the new moody, disquieting pallete, Third sounds strangely natural, and a big part to this is Beth Gibbon's haunting, chanteause voice - an aching quiver especially suited to expressing paranoia and vulnerability; and sounding more at ease along abrupt experimental sounds than simply with organic instruments. Her raw, wounded tone communicates the album's sense of helplessness and isolation perfectly. The music is a contrasting foil to the bleak lyrics, with guitar sounds and analogue instrumentation featuring more prominently on a soundscape that is constantly unsettled and esoterically creepy. A wailing theremin and goosebump-inducing Moog bassline harmonize with Gibbon's warped sigh on The Rip, frazzled drums and keyboards float above the cacophonous layers of percussive distortion on Machine Gun, while a ukulele leads Deep Water. Between the music's sinister grandeur and the pathos Gibbon imbues the lyrics with are some of the group's harshest, heaviest industrial numbers as well as their most eerie and frail ballads.
Portishead have, by their decade-long absence from the spotlight, become something of a legend. Unlike say Morcheeba who release an album every other year and feature guest vocalists ranging from Thomas Dybdahl to Judie Tzuke, their silence has made their return seem all the more like a radical transformation. Contradiction pervades Third on other levels. The music's lack of any tonal balance makes for an almost cerebral experience, yet it is alluringly human. The anxious, abrasive songwriting elements demand an attentive listen to appreciate the album as an ultimately absorbing redefinition of art pop. And Portishead, in keeping to their inimitable stylistic tendency, have crafted a record that is both riveting in its uniqueness and comforting in its familiarity.

talk.

silence from you is like the death of a tune

links

ctrl + left click

archive

the law of dreams is to keep moving

misc

so goes the backing track of all the sighs we ever sighed