It’s been nearly ten years since Portishead’s last release, 1998’s Roseland NYC Live, but with Third, they show that they haven’t missed a step as they deliver their darkest and most beautiful album to date. Shrouded in a cloud of reverb, otherworldly guitar, and film-noir organ, Beth Gibbons’ haunting vocals take us sedately through her darkest nightmares. The sonic textures are mesmerizing, the lyrics anguished, and the music simply gorgeous.
“Silence” sets the tone for the album with delayed guitar notes sifting over rumbling synth bass, electronic beats, and espionage guitar chords that could be from an old James Bond film. Gibbons’ vocals open with, “Tempted in our minds/tormented inside life,” introducing the themes that so frequently inhabit the music: loss, darkness, and anguish. The song closes with a repeated guitar line bedded in dreamy electro noises and fuzz that build until the song abruptly cuts out mid-phrase (à la the Beatles’ “I Want You”).
The sonic textures throughout are breathtaking, often making the ugliest sounds beautiful. The chorus of “Hunter” features a painfully bent note of guitar distortion that sounds like a dying motorcycle motor run through the Doppler effect. In “Plastic,” abrupt flutters of drum machines come out of nowhere, alternating between the speakers. When the chorus enters and the song disintegrates to a mess of synth distortion, Gibbons’ spine-chilling vocals ascend through the chaos as if the world is crumbling apart. Halfway through “Small,” a carnival-y organ enters with an ostinato as guitars bend and writhe in the background through phase shifters and distortion pedals. “We Carry On,” a dark, organ-driven nightmare with pounding, reverb-drenched timpani, is as dark as anything Radiohead or NIN could ever come up with.
At other points, the songs use simplicity and silence to great effect. “Deep Water”
sounds like it was recorded on an old gramophone in the '20s. Gibbons sings “I’m drifting in deep waters/alone with my self-regret,” accompanied only by a ukulele. “Machine Gun” layers Gibbons’ ghostly vocals over stuttering, minimalist electro beats.
In the album’s closing track, “Threads,” Gibbons’ voice twists in anguish at the top of her range over reverb-y crashes and guitar/synth sounds until everything fades out but unaccompanied, dissonant, distorted bends, leaving the listener entranced in the aftermath of Portishead’s nightmare.
Third is Portishead at their artistic apex. In the ten years of their hiatus, the musicians have matured tremendously, both as soundsmiths and songwriters, without losing any of the artistic vision or fire that initially brought them together. After so many years, Portishead still manage to make music that sounds like no one else, pushing their craft to artistic extremes and making the ugliest sounds beautiful without ever losing track of the music underneath.
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