Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 28/04/08
Label: Island

Returning to the fray with an unusually challenging leg of the All Tomorrow's Parties festival in bleakest Minehead, Portishead laid their black cards on the table from the off. Geoff Barrow has long nurtured an affection for the hipster's favourite strain of noise, the doom metal of Earth and Sunn O))), and his own Invada label is testament to his uncompromising tastes. But even after 11 years away from the limelight they were never likely to go metal. Remarkably though, the Bristol trio have accomplished something of the dark beauty of Sunn O))) without abandoning the essence of their sound.

Exquisitely detailed, you can well believe that this is an album many years in the making and one with twice those years of pain inscribed in its emotionally wracked songs. At "Third"'s centre is the droning majesty of "We Carry On" which punctuates its motorik insistency with brutal shards of minor chord discordance. It owes more to the Silver Apples and Joy Division than it does to Portishead benchmarks of old like John Barry. On a fully intense album, the song's impact is only matched by closer "Threads" - the closest they get to their trademark sound - and "Machine Gun".

Until the final synth chords, which could be plucked straight from the "Terminator" soundtrack, the latter is little more than a repeated drum roll and ravey stab all played by Barrow on electric drums. If Michael Mann made horror movies, they'd sound like this. It's a brave, skeletal structure over which Beth Gibbons' hollowed out emotional intensity sounds fragile and vulnerable. Surely a virtue of the slow and steady approach, you never get the sense of Portishead's radical overhaul on "Third" being a self-conscious pursuit of their influences. They've got a great record collection, obviously, but they've come about a very new sound by continually challenging themselves to do things differently.

Whether she is shaking with intensity ("Threads") or exquisitely fragile ("Hunter"), Gibbons outdoes herself on "Third", frequently making for painfully intimate listening. A pall of sorrow hangs over everything here as she sings of being "Worn out of thinking why I'm always so unsure", of being "emotionally undone." It's all grimly genuine; a damaged, f*cked up sister to the studio polish of fellow Bristolian Alison Goldfrapp's "Seventh Tree".

If there's a fault to this impressively wrought record it is this almost unbearable sadness that dominates the emotional mood. It will polarise opinion: the old butter soul strings lamented by the chill out set and the grimly intricate aesthetic celebrated elsewhere. But it's a shame that they couldn't have found just a few more glimmers of human warmth to make these fascinating, troubling songs a little easier to live with.

    by James Poletti