Friday, 14 March 2008
It’s a brilliant record of no small ambition or vision that will stand the test of time. Where have they been? One wonders. After an eleven year gap since the discreetly titled “Portishead” comes the equally minimal “Third” : a gap breached only a fabulous but superfluous live album, and the Beth Gibbons solo record.
And it’s as if Portishead have never been away. Their own, very personal brand of music - best described as ’Heartbroken Cowboy’, hangs on the kind of half-detuned slide guitar, the echoed, haunted vocal shorthand, and the relentless, broken rhythms that have always been a Portishead trademark. This time around, shorn of the coffee-table bullshit that poisoned ‘Dummy’, Portishead return as a peculiarly British slant that shows that they are often imitated, and only rarely equalled.
In those ten years much has happened. Oasis have become their own tribute act. George Lucas has put out three Star Wars films. The Internet happened. Everything changed. People just stopped listening to Portishead, and found their own new music to like. Aside it all, they simply disappeared. And in serious danger of becoming a mere footnote.
“Third” opens with “Silence”, driven by a barracking new-era Radiohead-style beat, it invokes the soundtrack to a film that never existed : a snapshot of 70’s Subway New York overhung with an air of unshakable foreboding. The minimal keyboard lines that permate the whole album are straight, sleek, unhurried and unfussed. Still, ten years is a long time and Portishead have had all the time in the world. And, then again, why fix what isn’t broken? Their previous template worked very well. As a result, these songs could’ve been recorded for any Portishead album : belonging to a long-distant time known as the Near Future, the album revolves around occasional, and underplayed moments of high drama - the rare drum roll that acts not as punctuation, but to elevate the tension, the perfectly timed guitar chord that seeks to, and succeeds in escalating tension beyond the merely uncomfortable. In the meantime, as on “Nylon Smile” Beth Gibbons turns a normally positive lyric such as “I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve you / I don’t know what I’d do without you” into a veiled, broken threat. It’s a haunting, minimal masterpiece of style and substance.
“Third” is a short forty minute journey. In the modern age of iTunes, it’s almost antiquated - holding this CD, listening to this voice for the first time again, which, in this age of bloated box sets and furious prolificitvity, makes this record a time capsule to the distant past of 1997 and also a familiar yet new friend. “Machine Gun” rattles like a semi-automatic weapon, and “Deep Water” sounds like an old blues song from a scratched wax disc in a museum : and make no mistake, it is an old-fashioned album. No mere collection of songs shoved together, nor any such thing as a half-formed thought, “Third” is a musical work of art, a successful artistic achievement, a worthy successor.Only registered users can write comments.
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