The musical fashions of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s have long since caught up with us at this point in the pop era. There is no way further than back to the nineties. Nothing today sounds older and more outdated than grunge. Brit-Pop, Trip-Hop… Sure, it won’t be long before these aesthetics haunt us again. The first lumberjack shirts have been spotted on the streets of Brooklyn and now, eleven years after the last studio album, Portishead is releasing a new work.
Can a band that once made the music of today still mean anything a decade later? Or do we have to settle into the next sentimental retro movement, dig out the 6os film posters, dust the lounges, clear the coffee tables?
Martial Reality
Working on this album was a bit like the US series “Lost”, explained Geoff Barrows to the English “Guardian”, “a never-ending journey with few answers”. “Machine Gun”, the first single (in the meantime more of a symbolic act than a recording format), gives the decisive answer to our questions on the first listen.
Portishead know how the world sounds today. The minimalist track, which merges the artificially simulated continuous fire of a machine gun with a “Blade Runner” synth melody, depicts the (martial) reality staged by the media, is good as a dystopia and at the same time refers to the found sounds on the last MIA album “Kalo.” built-in shots.
It would be a cold world Portishead are depicting here were it not for the voice of Beth Gibbons: “I saw a saviour/ A savior come my way/ I thought I’d see it/ At the cold light of day/ But now I realize that I’m/ Only for me.” An anti-Gospel.
“Third” is not an update of the trademark sound, not a linear progression, “Third” is unmistakably Portishead and yet very different, has an intensity, yes, physicality, not found anywhere on the first two albums. Like when Adrian Utley’s brute riff “We Carry On” transforms the disturbing climax of this overwhelming album from a darkly pulsating electronic track into a massive industrial piece.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAwEJgv6nLc
Trippy beats make the connection to Portishead’s past, but they rarely appear in their pure form: perhaps in the opening track “Silence”, in the chanson-esque “Nylon Smile” and in “Magic Doors”, which seems to open the door to the nineties and exudes the old magic of “Sour Times”.
Far more often on “Third” one feels reminded of the impressive “Out Of Season” that Beth Gibbons recorded with Rustin Man Paul Webb in 2002. “Small”, for example, starts out as a folk noir lament to a humming cello, only towards the end does a heavy prog organ, psychedelic guitar and scratchy electronics join in. In “The Rip” the white horses of the apocalypse dance to “Wild Horses” by the Stones, in “Deep Water” Gibbons ventures to unimagined heights to the ukulele and sounds like Elizabeth Cotton.
Again and again her tormented and wounded soul flees into such folk wrecks and chanson ruins on “Third” from electronically generated helicopter noise, air raid alarms and first-person shooter sounds. “I stand on the edge of a broken sky/ And I will come down; don’t know why.”
The third seal is broken and we see heaven open.
This review appeared in ROLLING STONE to accompany the release of “Thrird” in April 2008. An article from the RS archives.