Portishead Third by: Ed Butler Thu:15-May-08 Label: Island Year: 2008 WB rating 93 out of 100

It’s difficult to imagine the frustration that so many middling bands must feel when a group like Portishead re-emerge from the musical ether after an 11 year hiatus and make an album like Third. After slaving away at their craft for however long, yearning for respect and acclaim, a pack of upstarts from the mid-90s poke their heads out and make an album that is simply beyond their meagre talents. Yes, Portishead, and Third, are that good.

Not satisfied with picking things up where they left off, Portishead have decisively hit the reset button. This is unambiguously, even defiantly, a Portishead album. In an era when trip hop is a faded relic, a forgotten sound from a decade ago, Portishead didn’t get suckered into revisiting the genre they helped pioneer – a genre which was eventually bastardised. Third is in no way a member of that most nebulously titled genre, but a new Portishead record, indefinable and impossible to catalogue.

The creepy, nightmarish dinner party ambience of their Dummy-era remains, but twisted and distorted beyond recognition, awash in unrecognizable sounds, unique atmosphere, and Beth Gibbons’ angelic/demonic voice. Her voice is as traumatically beautiful as ever, and just as versatile, alternating between the proverbial quivering wreck in the corner, rocking back-and-forth with hands wrapped around her knees, to soaring, melodic and heartbreaking chanteuse. Irrespective of which Gibbons persona appears from track-to-track, however, she remains exquisitely vulnerable, inalienably in tune with the music of Adrian Utley and Geoff Barrow. Even when backed by a mere ukulele, as on ‘Deep Water’, she still manages to make things sound positively unearthly, and that’s before the heavily sedated barber shop quartet jump in.

But ‘Deep Water’s significance runs deeper than that. When stood alongside anything from Portishead’s admittedly sparse back catalogue, it is unmistakably abnormal. On Third, Portishead are by no means playing it safe. ‘We Carry On’ is sinister Krautrock, reminiscent of Can at their most repetitious and experimental. The gentle, rhythmic electro that fades in underneath Gibbons’ lung-busting single note hum recalls Radiohead at their most uneasily pretty. Opening track, ‘Silence’ is a deadened punk number, its abrupt ending, as discomfiting as having a door slammed in one’s face, an appropriate hors d'oeuvre for the smorgasboard on offer for the following 45 minutes.

But this is a digression. Gibbons’ voice, timeless and utterly unique, vulnerable but impenetrable, has always been the factor that elevated Portishead above all others that dared set foot into their realm. Her voice lends the band’s sound an otherworldly, heartsick quality that is yet to be – and is unlikely to ever be – repeated, and nowhere is this more glaringly obvious that on lead single ‘Machine Gun’. Somehow, coming off the back of ‘Deep Water’, ‘Machine Gun’s polar opposite, her voice melts into the scenery. A sonic chameleon, she can retain Portishead’s resolute creepiness in any and all environments Barrow and Utley deem fit to toss her into.

Take ‘Magic Doors’, where cruisy funk beats are chopped up and rearranged over alien strings - which seem to have received the same treatment - before a positively epic piano steps in to propel the song to another plane altogether. Somehow, into this entirely foreign aural landscape, Gibbons effortlessly sidles in and delivers typically crushing lyrics. “I can’t deny what I’ve become/I’m just emotionally undone”, she croons, wavering uncertainly on the edge of the song. Because if there is one constant across Dummy, Portishead and Third, it is the overwhelmingly gloomy subject matter.

After helping establish trip hop, Portishead decided to defy and deny genre upon their return. Not rock, not punk, not electronic, certainly not trip hop, Third is almost post-music. This is still, to some extent, the same Portishead that somehow provided the soundtrack to a million cafe lattes in the late 1990s, but they’re newly risen from the grave. And this is no immaculate resurrection, but the rotting, undead corpse of old ancestors revisiting past horrors.

While Third is, undoubtedly, the most stubbornly difficult, and least accessible of Portishead’s three albums, those willing to give it repeat listens will find themselves rewarded by an album which will, in time, sit comfortably alongside Dummy as one of the greatest albums of their genre. Whatever genre that is.