Portishead - Third
A Bristol legend.
Beth Gibbons is back. Okay, again my apologies for reviewing an album that has been already out for a year. Every Portishead album brings me on a little journey. It takes me awhile to absorb it, appreciate it and become a slave to it. It’s impossible to review their latest album, without taking a trip down memory lane.
Back in 1994, I was a newbie to this thing called the Internet. Chugging along on my 14.4 voice modem from USR Robotics, which I recently upgraded from the trusty 9600bps. I was listening to Magic Carpet Ride, the Fatboy Slim remix. There was no way in the world I would have been exposed to the world of Trip-Hop, yet alone Portishead. So, the real adventure began in 1997 when I was in college and a mate of mine introduced me to Dummy. It took a week on my Panasonic Discman Portable Player (which I still have and it still works!). I became an avid fan of this genre of music (some call it trip hop, some call it chill out music, some even call it lo-fi), I still call it Trip Hop. I was blown away by Numb. The baselines, the haunting vocals, the works. This mercury prized album was an artwork that deserves to be in any music lover’s collection of albums. It’s also in the Rolling Stone’s Top 500 albums of all time and in that yellow book 1,000 albums you must own. Over the years, Glory Box became one of my top 250 songs of all time.
In 1997, Portishead returned with a self titled follow-up album. This album was quite low profiled and hardly got mentioned in the press, which is what they prefer anyway. It was around 1998 when I got wind of this album. News sure moved a lot slower back then. No twitter and feeds yeah. This was possibly Portishead’s weakest album and it did not really reach the levels that Dummy did.
Random thought: Portishead introduced me to vinyls and scratching/turntablism even before the Scratch Perverts or Invisible Scratch Picklz or even Kid Koala.
Then my real music journey began as I landed in the UK. Over the next 5 years, I attended gigs, festivals and worked up a heathy debt buying albums. The Roseland sessions showed the flexibility of Trip Hop and how a full ochestra complements Portishead’s sound. Brilliant stuff.
Then they disappeared. Well not disappear like Shea Seger (who I still don’t know where she has gone). They went on a hiatus until 2006 when stuff started appearing on their MySpace page. Then they appeared to be coming out with a new album and they did a cover on a Serge Gainsbourg tribute album.
2007, they started gigging. 2008, Third was released, which I finally got a copy last week. Their first album in 11 years. The album kicks off with Silence, which gives me chilly goosebumps like something coming off a Trainspotting album. Very Orbital. The thing about Trip Hop is, it is timeless. Beth’s vocals and Portishead’s sound work in two ways. Introducing a newbie to Trip Hop, which would timewarp them back to the 90s Trip Hop movement. The second way is that it re-introduces us music junkies to what we have sorely missed over the last 11 years. The vocals, the guitars, the un-matched arrangements. Next up is Hunter, which has become my favourite track of the album. It has an instant make of a classic and I can’t help but get the Mazzy Star feel because of the keyboards, tempo and beat PLUS the echoic nature of Beth’s vocals.
Nylon Smile gives listeners an arabic feel. Maybe it’s the drums but listening to it brings me down to a cobble stone path listening and watching a persian princess singing melodic tunes. The Rip feels like a tribute to Radiohead. The drawl of her voice is evident here over the simple guitar tune. Incidently Radiohead has praised this album. Plastic is reminiscent of Mysterons but without the scratching. The drum rolls are superb.
As we hit the middle of the album, I am awoken from my trance-y state to the chunky beats and electronica at its best in We Carry On. As I always say, an album journey of listening needs to bring the listener to different levels and I felt like I was on a roller coaster as an old skool Deep Water followed, which brings forward a grammaphone feel of the classic 60s. What sounded like a ukulele or a basic acoustic guitar brings us….oh crap. Boy was I wrong, the song twisted into an electronic-drum-filled manic tune with the keyboard slamming away. Genius.
Small, another aural roller coaster type of a song with soft vocals followed by banging bass/drums. The journey continues with a typical Portishead trippy song with Magic Doors and its trippy beats. I’m so going to get killed by music lovers who hate the term Trip Hop. Sorry boys/girls - you can’t define it otherwise. The album closes with Threads, a very industrial and electronic song lambasted by Beth’s voice.
Time it took me to write this review: 49 minutes, 28 seconds. Roughly the time it took me to listen to the album.
A short review: Brilliant. It educated me on what was missing in my audiolife for the last 11 years. Hunter will be a cult classic. An explosive Trip Hop album that lingers along psychedelic and experimental rock.
A long review: I have nothing else to say. But I would like to quote Nate Patrin, from his Pitchfork review of Portishead’s Third.
Keep in mind just how out-of-nowhere this all seems: The notion of a new Portishead album had, for many fans, fallen out of the realm of possibility. If Third had come out in 1999 or 2000, maybe writers would be calling it Portishead’s answer to Massive Attack’s Mezzanine, another third album by trip-hop icons eschewing dinner-conversation music by embracing anxiety and moodiness. Released today, it instead feels like a staggering transformation and a return to form that was never lost, an ideal adaptation by a group that many people didn’t know they needed to hear again.
Geoff Barrow and Adrian Utley. Sorry, I needed to mention their naames but Portishead would not be Portishead without Beth Gibbons. Beth’s voice is the soul of Portishead.