It’s a rare band that can take a decade-long break and return stronger than ever, but few bands possess the rarified talent Portishead does. Building on 1994’s Dummy and 1997’s Portishead, the intuitively titled Third manages to simultaneously refine and diversify the English trio’s spooky electronic sound, resulting in the best album of an already-stellar career.
The fact that the music Portishead make lends itself to punny genre tags (trip-hop, down tempo, acid jazz, etc.) speaks to their approach. What they do does not defy categorization. Rather, they delve deeper into what we are familiar with, put their electronic spin on it and explode it from the inside.
Exploiting the listener’s pop sensibilities like this, Third sounds something like an audio film, a concept reinforced by the faux-vintage Portuguese invocation starting the first track, “Silence.” It’s the worst track on the album, featuring a tumbling guitar too reminiscent of Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song,” but the album only goes up from there.
“Hunter” is the album’s throwback track, featuring a distinctly Portisheadian dirge-like drumbeat. Then “Nylon Smile” puts forth an eastern-sounding, tropical-danger beat. It kicks off what becomes an album-long trend: expanding the band’s musical universe while in no way betraying their electronic roots.
This is continued most notably in “The Rip,” which gives guitarist Adrian Utley an unusual acoustic opportunity. Singer Beth Gibbons, who has the exact same Edith Piaf-with-a-metallic-sheen voice she did 11 years ago, makes this another haunting song stuck somewhere between a dream and a nightmare, as she repeats “While white horses / They will take me away.”
All of these fine tracks are outdone, though, by the phenomenal “Plastic,” which is probably producer and multi-instrumentalist Geoff Barrow’s greatest achievement so far. Barrow contrasts a slow, moody Utley riff with a rapid-fire, helicopter-like sound effect to create something that should never work, somehow does and is that much more remarkable for it.
It creates a disconcerting simulation of unintentional art, like watching a romantic old movie while a jagged piece of film continuously slaps the projector casing. Meanwhile, a third sonic undercurrent, a purely electronic, ominous sci-fi flourish, seems to be attempting to break through to daylight more and more throughout the track until it finally takes over in the last 30 seconds.
None of this is to mention the album’s first single, “Machine Gun,” which is simpler, but produces the most immediately powerful effect. As the title suggests, its beat is quick and intense in a way that might be described as much as electroconvulsive as electronic.
It would hardly have been surprising if
Portishead’s long-awaited comeback failed—after all, many bands of similar stature have in the past. Third should silence any doubts about their current viability and leave fans as excited as ever for Fourth or whatever else their next might be called. One can only hope we don’t have to wait another 11 years for it.
