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This is what I get from listening to a magazine review, something I don't like. I thought it would be good, but I am disappointed in the end. I don't listen to this album anymore. It's one of those recordings that get all the good buzz and praise and you buy it and it's awful.
I completely understand those who call this music "prog" because it's very sophisticated and goes on mind-bending tangents. Some subversive purpose may be served here, but I still prefer to just skip this one. And like dreams, it morphs in strange ways, burrowing through tunnels and going to disturbing places. By far the most depressing thing they've put out yet. *****+ "We Carry On" - A jumble of oppressive electronics, this music is dark and deformed.
***** "Hunter" - This one's a sweet and hazy dream. I prefer not to label it. A tour de force. ***** "Small" - a beautiful contemplative meditation that reeks of paranoid isolation. Portishead changes the game plan on THIRD, largely abandoning the trip-hop formula they helped pioneer.
** "Machine Gun" - Underneath the jarring, mechanical atmosphere lies an amazing, futuristic-sounding song. This is some of the most interesting, exciting stuff I've heard in a while. A masterpiece loaded with abrupt left turns. "Silence" - launches out across unknown territory like a train running off the tracks into a barren land, tumbling headlong into Beth Gibbons' nightmare-ish world spinning out of control.
*****+ "Nylon Smile" - Gibbons is worrying her heart out on this hypnotic, unsettling trip through emotional wreckage. Is that the trumpeting of electric elephants. A brilliant return after such a long wait. ***** "Deep Water" - This track is a radical departure from everything else here. I frankly find Beth's vocals to be terribly weak and I'm really not feeling the ukulele or the quaint minstrel back-up singers either. This album is all about uncomfortable feelings and this track sounds like a schizophrenic hell. Possibly the best track. Or maybe it's the opening of secret portals.
This is a pretty unique piece of music and a striking reinvention. *****+ "Threads" - absolutely bleak and harrowing, this could be the most emotionally unhinged song ever. *****+ "The Rip" - A supremely beautiful song - "Wild white horses, they will take me away." It begins with sweetly picked acoustic guitar followed by driving keyboards and further intensified by insistent drums. *****+ "Plastic" - features an off-kilter, unraveling sound like a slow-motion helicopter followed by white hot intensity. ***** "Magic Doors" - dramatic and truly strange sounds abound. *****+
cd arrived on time and it was in the condition stated. would recomend seller.
That does not mean though that I have a "Dummy" ruler with which I check if the new album fits the standards. If you want something that sounds like their previous albums there is a very simple solution: listen to the previous albums. Upon reading the 1-star reviews of the angry fans, they have realized their mistake and went back to the studio to record a new album with the same stuff they were doing 10 years ago. They're changing dynamics inside the songs and on the album as a whole (just think of the odd pairing of the soothing "Deep Water" and the disturbing "Machine Gun") while at the same time providing a wonderful counterbalance with Beth's eerie voice.There is a very smooth transition from the first to the last tracks.
Are you kidding me. Portishead would like to apologize to their fans for not producing "Dummy 2" or "Portishead 3". It doesn't, and that's wonderful. Give it some time, come back to it later. Musicians evolve and try to create music that they feel is meaningful.
The trip-hop is still there, the melancholy is plenty, but the band has also added new stuff to the mix: some alternative atmosphere (no wonder Radiohead did a cover of "The Rip"), some psychedelic undertones (the second half of "Small", reminiscent of early Pink Floyd), some powerful electronic beats (the mighty "Machine Gun", or the menacing "We Carry On"). It might just not be your album, but there's also a chance that it will start growing on you and then the reward will be tremendous. Wait, what. The first half of the album is a powerful reminder of why we love Portishead in the first place. Sometimes experimentation works, other times it does not.
But for Portishead it has sure done wonders.I love their first two albums just as much as anyone else. The second half is a sign of things to come, and why some of us will still love Portishead even if they might sound nothing like in the beginning. One morning you'll wake up hooked to the beat of Machine Gun and that will pretty much be it.
Third sounds like ten years worth of suffering in all the right ways. An insolent aspect of Portishead's unnerving new personality comes across in the albums first single "Machine Gun", a track that is two minutes of song followed by two minutes of repetitive, ring modulated drum samples.
Roseland NYC Live, authenticated the bands short but sweet legacy with one of the most prolific, profound and exceedingly produced live performances ever birthed by the human condition. Anyone who first sampled Portishead's equally sulky and scintillating, espionage influenced trip-hop after 1998 surely had a dream or two crushed under the weight of the trio's ten year hiatus from touring and releasing new material.
The sounds themselves bring to mind an image of the trio carrying a laptop into the musky music room of an old English estate that was abandoned in the 1930's and setting up studio amongst rickey organs and warped, rusty and otherwise ruined instruments. With Third we find beloved singer Beth Gibbons ditching the hooky choruses that made the first two albums, in favor of a dynamically diminishing delivery that drops the demeanor of the new tracks to a chilling degree of alienation compared to the cool, easier-to-relate-to gloom of earlier work.
The in-house production from Geoff Barrow is equally unhinged offering only a few glimpses of the old formula through a veil of experimental song structure. Those fans expecting a return to form or a jovial resurrection are met by an album that makes an infallible case against the old saying "time heals all wounds".
- Tyler Starkey[.].
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