Here's my review:
More genteel and darker, Portishead’s Third feels like a timely comeback – a sort of reinvention of the almost dated Bristol-triphop sound into the psychedelic, art-rock terrain without abandoning the crushed and bruised Billie Holiday crooning of cabaret diva Beth Gibbons and the spooky, movie score indulgences of its beat alchemist Geoff Arrow. It’s ten years of waiting that makes this collection of brooding noir, a strange but satisfying welcome to fans of the pioneering triphop trio who once brought us the cinematic Dummyand the self-titled Portishead. Inevitably, it’s like aged wine with much savory taste and a lasting cloy, a determined quality that makes the long wait, a rewarding experience.
Instead of distancing into off-kilter territories, Third confidently draws its listener into its estranged homelessness, renewing trusts on its breathy spaces, bleakness and a stab at its distinct, hypnotic power. This is to say that fans and even non-fans would easily be captured by the mood it tries to convey, whether its Beth Gibbons recalling her morose times on “Silence” where she’s “fallen through changes” or her showcasing of undying optimism on the ukulele-driven, psychedelic folk number “Dark Water.”
More dissonant and noise-buried than its previous records, Third is compellingly a tribute to moods and jarring electronics. Its musical setting is more perverse than ever, opened to every complex possibilities like the militarist, industrial-stomp tracks in the mold of a darker Nine Inch Nails (“Machine Gun”), krautrock rhythms meets Bjork-Homogenic era (“We Carry On”) and the fragile, electro-psych ballads ala Goldfrapp (“The Rip”).
Yet despite layers of cacophonous noise and excessive experiments, Third is primarily a guitar-driven, ambient record heavy on electronic build-up and percussions, which emphasizes Gibbons’ emotive vocal delivery. Gibbons has always the lost soul that confided within the trenches of Portishead’s post-hiphop hype, and in Third, she makes use of her voice as the principal ornate force. On “The Rip,” she’s the ethereal Kate Bush trapped in a build up of progressive synths and drowning reverbs after free-flowing in languid, guitar pop that the song tries to evoke in first few minutes; while on “Threads,” she’s the sexy, angry beast that tries to outbreak into the cave layered with discordant electronics and tropicalia guitar samples while it slowly approaches the sketchy noise, the sirens, the piercing drumbreaks – where all the madness goes into ho-hum nightmare.
Of course without the studio wizardry of Geoff Arrow and the band’s resident multi-instrumentalist Adrian Utley, there would be no sickly wounded groove and dark electronic-opera as Third. It’s a celebrated effort, really – the death of triphop, a renewed confidence courtesy of their darker, more ambient sound, a comeback that would christen Portishead as 2008’s toughest avant-garde act to beat. No longer are they just triphop pioneers or music has-beens that we once worshipped. In fact, Portishead revolutionize its own mold, which is something monumental in pop music nowadays.
