Portishead's Third = Uneven, Somewhat Mediocre

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Portishead’s third studio album, unimaginatively titled Third, has been a long time coming. Ten years have passed since their last studio album, and most folks assumed the trio of Geoff Barrow, Beth Gibbons, and Adrian Utley were defunct, having released two massively popular and extremely influential albums and a very impressive live album featuring a 35-piece orchestra. I for one assumed they were kaput, especially when Beth Gibbons released her stunningly mediocre (and mostly ignored) solo album in 2002.

Rumors began circulating last year, though, that Portishead were back in the studio recording new material…and I was certainly excited. The promise of new music featuring the band’s trademark reverbed spy-thriller guitars, monstrous beats, and Beth Gibbons’ thin, wasted vocals was practically enough to make me twitch with excitement. So when I had the chanced to come across a pre-release copy of the album this week, I pounced on the opportunity and fairly jammed it into my CD player, ready to drown myself in their deep, shivery depths.

But…ummm, that didn’t exactly happen.

The album’s first track, “Silence,” opens with a very lo-fi sample of somebody babbling in what might be Portuguese, followed by a surprisingly fast, and again, very lo-fi, beat loop that honestly sounds like it was taken from an old mixtape Barrow found under the seat of his car one day. I had a sudden bad feeling. Although I really liked their second, self-titled album, I felt that the vinyl-crackle that saturated the entire album was, at times, annoying—but it did not in any way harm the quality of the songwriting or the melodies and beats. There was something too lo-fi about the beat that begins “Silence,” and I immediately began hoping that this would prove to be just an introduction and that the real beats would kick in soon. Well, they don’t. Some thin, reedy strings and soft, almost muddied guitar washes creep in eventually, sounding far too My Bloody Valentine-ish for my tastes, and then—it all stops, and the vocals begin. Beth Gibbons sounds like she’s practically falling asleep at the mic.

This is what Portishead’s have been waiting ten years for? Ummmm. Okay.

Fortunately, the second track, “Hunter,” brings back the bass-heavy beats and a more recognizable, interesting song structure, with a melody just as strong as any “Wandering Star” or “All Mine”—but just as the song begins to really pick up steam…it fades out, to be followed by the utterly tedious “Nylon Smile” with another muffled, almost featureless tribal beat and some backwards guitar that sounds like it was recorded in closet.

04 - The Rip

And this is how the entire album is: a strange mishmash of familiar Portishead brilliance mixed with moments of absolutely abysmal production. Gibbons’ vocals, other than on the first song, are uniformly strong, and when Utley’s guitar-work is allowed to surface, it really shines—though mostly gone are the ‘verbed-out James-Bond tones that made me so fond of the band’s sound. There are a number of very, very good songs on here, namely the extremely soft and mournful “The Rip,” “We Carry On,” and my favorite track, “Magic Doors.” But there are also gross wastes of recording time like “Deep Water,” which is nothing by Gibbons’ voice, some ukele strumming, and some of the absolute worst vocoding effects I have ever heard on an album. And, for some reason, all of the best songs have annoying fade-out endings…which just says to me, “We don’t know where else to go with this song so let’s just fade it out and call it done.”

All in all, Portishead’s Third is an extremely uneven album that is an obvious departure from their past stuff—which can be a good thing at times, yes…but definitely is not in this case. Portishead is known to be one of the founders of trip-hop…and there’s very little evidence of trip-hop on their album. It’s more experimental than any of their previous work, and for them, experimentalism just is not a Good Thing. It makes the album sound thrown-together, stitched up from various outtakes and extra tracks they’ve had lying around half-done for the past decade. Skinny Puppy put out The Greater Wrong of the Right after having been away for a decade, and they produced an album that was 100% tight, every single track meshing perfectly with the track before it, all tied together with a common production value and design sensibility. You don’t get that with this Portishead album. It really does sound like a collection of random old half-finished tracks that Gibbons’ dubbed some lyrics over.

I won’t say it’s a particularly bad album—the songs that are really good on it are really good—but the sheer unevenness of the album and the undone quality of it make it a rather mediocre comeback. After ten years, Third sounds more like a B-sides and demos retrospective than an actual album.