Portishead: Third
Friday, 25 Apr 2008 14:34
The Bristolian greats return with a fantastic slice of terror and dread
Island, out April 28th.
In a nutshell….
Definitely worth the wait
What's it all about?
This is a plan for how not to become a ridiculously famous band:
1. Make a debut album that is amazing and genre-defining and ends up winning the Mercury Music Prize
2. Follow it up with a fairly good and really quite gritty second record that cements your position as one of the country's most interesting electronic bands.
3. Do nothing for the next decade.
But that's pretty much exactly what Bristol-based Portishead did. If you can believe it, Dummy was released way back in 1994 and the slightly less famous Portishead album came out in 1997. For those of you counting, it means that the last time the band released a record Tony Blair was still a fresh-faced politician who was going to make Britain cool by inviting Oasis to Number 10 for tea.
By anyone's reckoning, taking a decade to knock up an album is fairly slow going. But then, there was always that proverb about the tortoise and the hare... And on Third, Portishead have managed to make the only acceptable kind of record after such a long layoff - that is, a really rather excellent one.
Who's it by?
Remember Portishead? Along with Massive Attack they created trip-hop and almost single-handedly gave middle-class people something to play at dinner parties after the coffee but before Gregory skinned up and everyone got stoned.
For anyone that cares, Portishead are still made up of Geoff Barrow, Beth Gibbons and Adrian Utley, just as they were back in 1994 when Dummy hit the streets.
After Dummy, the band took three years to produce their self-titled sophomore album. Then nothing. Zip. Silence. The group put themselves on hiatus and "concentrated on solo projects", which is pretty much a euphemism for they'd all got sick of the sight of each other and needed a break.
In 2005, Portishead got back together to perform a charity gig. Suddenly the rumour mill started and everyone was sure that another record was in the offing. In typical fashion, it actually took another three years before Third saw the light of day…
Likelihood of a trip to the Grammys
After such a long pause between released, you can just imagine the critics getting ready to slate this record. But it's actually been amazingly well received and has managed to sound both exactly like Portishead did a decade ago and interesting and modern. And those sorts of comebacks are exactly the stories that people love come award time. It really wouldn't be shocking to see the band strolling up from their table come the Mercury's or Brits and putting everyone else who's been making music for the last ten years to shame.
What the others say
"They sound more troubled than ever. Which is good news for the rest of us." - Chris Campion, Guardian
"Both ancient and futuristic, a mildewed signal from a more advanced culture that failed to survive the ice age, Third doesn't make you pay attention to its desolate contours, but rather stare out of the window, creeping panic causing your mind to dart in a million dark directions at once." - Nick Southall, drownedinsound.com
"Turns out there's a lot to be said for disappearing for a decade until everyone starts thinking of you in that slightly fond nostalgic way, and then coming back and dropping your best record yet." - Louise Patterson, Vice
Check out the video for Machine Gun here:
So is it any good?
The opening beats of Third sound almost exactly like a Prodigy record, but then that voice kicks in and its like we're back in 1994 and we're all falling in love with Beth Gibbons' vocal prowess all over again. The vulnerability and strength of the lady's voice really cements the record. It means that it still sound exactly like you remember Portishead sounding like, even though the musical backing is decidedly modern and much more sinister than anything the band tried in the happy-do-lucky days of the mid-90s.
The insistent beats of We Carry On prove the point perfectly. Strip Gibbons' rich vocals away from the track and you'd find a song that is as up to date as it's possible to be without it hurting. In a very dubstep-y way, it even sounds a bit like part of the beat is made up of sampled helicopter and another bit sounds like an alarm. But then you add the voice into the equation and there's something familiar and reassuring about the song. It's like Beth gives the band the continuity they need to produce music that it both appealing to old fans and forward-looking enough to still have a point.
In fact, the whole first half of the record is like that. All the songs, and especially The Silence and Plastic, manage to tread a line between what you would have wanted the next Portishead record to have sounded like in 1998 and what you'd hope the band would be making if this was their seventh album and they'd somehow managed not to go completely over the top.
But easy listening this record is not. If you had to guess, you'd probably way that the decade away had not been kind to the members of Portishead. A sense of dread pervades the whole LP and manifests it's in a number of startling and wonderful ways. They range from the unsettling acoustic break of Deep Water at the record's mid point through to nightmarish piano bit in the middle of Hunter.
It's at the points were the terror and dread are at their peak that Beth's voice and the music most effectively combine. The fact that Machine Gun is both Third's best track and its most unsettling is no coincidence. Jagged beats that really do sound like gunfire almost obscure the vocals, but the song's treat is that the haunting voice does still soar – offering hope to the bleakest moments.
9/10
James Cooper
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