portishead third

Portishead: Hit the Ground Running

2008-06-04T00:08:00.000-07:00

Without warning, bands can and do often up and say, “and now for something completely different.” For evidence, check out the catastrophic switch from No Doubt’s 2000 released ska-punk finale Return Of Saturn to the cheesy electro biscuit Rock Steady from the next year. They went from Sublime approved rock to cleavage pop on a dime and haven’t looked back since. History is swimming with such examples. So, with an excruciating ten-year, unofficial hiatus separating Third and the eponymous second Portishead studio release, one should naturally expect massive change.

Dummy, a Mercury Prize winner, and the self-titled sophomore record were respectively released in 1994 and 1997. They were both prime examples of the trip-hop fusion of hip-hop and ethereal downtempo, and remain seminal works of the genre. Coincidentally, ‘94 to ‘97 marks the peak and sad decline of trip-hop, so expecting a return to an all but dead form would purely be wishful thinking on the listener’s behalf. For reasons beyond the grasp of mere mortals, trip-hop is not coming back, nor its bastard cousin illbient. Light a candle if you must.

As such, a first listen to the unimaginatively titled Third can be a little confusing or even off-putting. The static laden samples and sluggish scratching are gone, and most electronic effects have been pushed into a warmly analog Moog and Theremin role. However, patience and a little faith reveal Portishead third LP to be a work of sublime subtlety and dynamic depression easily on par with its critically adored predecessors. Building on the second album, this is their most “live” studio work yet, as well as being their most obviously diverse effort.

Despite its minute and a half length, “Deep Water” immediately sticks out. All there is to it is a ukulele, the always-sorrowful voice of Beth Gibbons, and a little bit of barbershop backup vocalizing. It’s not one of the album’s best tracks, but I’ve listened to their two studio albums and watched the live DVD a hundred times and I’ve never heard anything remotely like it. That’s about the definition of putting it all out there—they’re not playing it safe by any means.
“The Rip” is a fine piece, starting off with a humble Theremin howl and a finger-picked acoustic guitar. Gibbon’s vocals come in almost immediately and continue till about halfway. Then, a forceful drum track and moog bassline harmonizing with the acoustic fade in, as Gibbons’ sigh becomes electronically extended. Imagine Goldfrapp fronting Numbers and you’re close. Following that, “Plastic” is probably most like the mid-’90s Portishead we came to worship. It’s based in creepy organ and vocal sorrow, but with an erratic, choppy rhythm section snippet and warbling knock on wood sample that pine for the old days.

Channelling Broadcast mixed with a little Adult., “We Carry On” has an up-tempo, tribal beat and steady moaning keyboard. The whine doubles up about two and a half minutes in, cueing a righteous guitar solo that punctuates the verses. It’s like post-drone-rock, only more cool than that looks on paper. Going for the other end of the spectrum, “Magic Doors” is cut from a pure classic rock cloth. Starting from the dead TV channel tone, it has a punchy Bonham beat, an eerie accordion sound, a nice round bassline, and a moving piano that underscores the chorus. Surprisingly, it also has more cowbell, with an almost Chambers Brothers “Time Has Come Today” reverb. Bruce Dickenson would put his pants on for that one.

Overall, Third appears to give jazz guitarist Adrian Utley more reign in songwriting, while turntablist producer Geoff Barrow has put his coffin away in lieu of outboard analog gear. Yet, as always, the unsettling lounge singer stylings of Beth Gibbons is the focal point. As witnessed by the slightly off Out Of Season collaboration with Paul “Rustin’ Man” Webb of Talk Talk, Gibbons’ terribly unique tones don’t tend to work all that well over sweetly organic instrumentals. She needs a little abrupt weirdness in her music or she stands out for the wrong reasons. Repeated exposure to “Deep Water” will reveal that to you, sure enough (in context, it works… just imagine a whole album of that).

So, on their third studio album, Portishead have succeeded in striking the careful balance between progressing their sound to where it should be 11 years later and retaining the esoteric creepiness that makes them tick. I don’t hear much in the way of clear, winning singles, not like the first two albums, but that seems to work in the album’s favor. Third is a complete work of art to fully immerse yourself in, listened to start to finish. It will be a little awkward initially, like Garth’s feeling towards putting on new underwear. After a while, it will become a part of you. History will eventually see it rank on par with the rest of their legendary works.

by Filmore Mescalito Holmes

http://www.popmatters.com/pm/music/reviews/57159/portishead-third/

Portishead Review by Michaelangelo Matos

2008-05-27T23:27:00.000-07:00

Portishead has only made three albums in 14 years—and what right-thinking person would have wanted more? If they'd pumped out a new disc every other year, no matter how good, they'd have turned into Morcheeba—a moody relic, forever stuck in a moment when breakbeats and bad vibes for boom times hadn't become the sound of abject nostalgia. Instead, Portishead has become a minor legend by keeping silent. Though Beth Gibbons has recorded with Rustin Man in the meantime, Portishead's producers, Geoff Barrow and Adrian Utley, have only loomed larger in their absence, allowing the trio to slip the dated trip-hop tag. The triumph of Third is that it sounds exactly like Portishead and nothing like trip-hop. This is the late-night, beat-driven, torpid-languid music of a zillion coffee shops, sure, but with the blood drained out of it, a creepy-crawly, black-and-white-sounding thing that gets under the skin and stays there from the first play. On tracks like "The Rip" (whose rubber-band keyboards and tick-tocking drums are reminiscent of mid-period Stereolab) and the smoky-hazy "Nylon Smile," Gibbons sounds more hollowed-out and harrowed than ever, a human nervous twitch on too much coffee and too little sleep. And whether it's the muscular steel-sheet guitars of "We Carry On," the frayed electronic drums and keyboard stabs of "Machine Gun," or the psychedelic spaghetti-Western soundtrack of "Silence," Barrow and Utley provide deep spaces for Gibbons' raw emotions to sink into, and nearly every track provides some little sonic goodie midway through as a reward for continued attention after all these years. For once, it's worth the effort.

Radiohead Love Portishead

2008-05-21T06:35:00.000-07:00

Radiohead have spoken passionately about the new Portishead record, revealing they think it is "their best album".

"Third" was released yesterday and is the first new material from Beth Gibbons and co in over a decade.

Thom Yorke and Ed O'Brien appeared on BBC Radio this week, calling the LP "incredible" and "mental"."It's dark as man.

Definitely their best record, there's no doubt about that", said Thom of the acclaimed comeback.
Meanwhile, O'Brien commented: "It's so beautiful; it's so beautiful in parts. I have to say I actually think it's my favourite Portishead record."

Up Close and Personal: Geoff Barrow

2008-05-20T06:11:00.000-07:00

It’s been ten years since your last LP…

We finished the last tour in 1998 fairly broken people. We’re not made for the excesses of the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle. At that time The Verve had just split up, so were headlining all the European festivals. We were a studio band with fairly strange sound issues playing to 55,000 people. It all went down incredibly well. But there was loads of personal stuff going on behind the scenes, which was just horrible. We had all kinds of divorces and illnesses…Personally I quit music for about four years.

Hence the long break…

But what it came down to is that there’s never any point in releasing a record if you’ve got nothing to say, and at that point we were running on empty. We had to go out and live a little bit, rebuild our personal lives and get the drive to think we were doing something forward thinking. Adrian and Beth went off and did other things: Beth made her own record, of course, and Adrian did some soundtrack stuff. I escaped. I ran to Australia. In 2001 Adrian and I went to record some Portishead material in Sydney in a mate’s studio for seven weeks – but it just didn’t feel right. It didn’t feel like we were breaking any new ground.

So when did things start coming together for the new album?

Not until 2003, when I wrote “Magic Doors”. I wrote it, Beth sang on it, and it was the first time we thought “Oh, this is actually all right” you know what I mean? Basically, we have a policy which is one step forward, eight steps back. We’ve never felt any pressure from outside, it’s all internal – there’s a lot of self-doubt in Portishead. In 2006 we had a meeting with our record company, because our A and R guy went to run Virgin. So we thought we’d better go and meet whoever was left. So we went to meet the MD, and we played him seven tracks. We went back a year later and we had six tracks, because we’d dropped one and were just about to drop another three. If we didn’t have to work this way, we wouldn’t, believe me.

Where have the new ones come from?

Once we get on a roll, it’s OK – we wrote five or six tracks in six months. What happens is we write an idea, say a guitar and vocal, and that could sit on the shelf for three years. It gets pulled down every now and then, and I’ll have a tinker with it, and then get really depressed because I can’t come up with anything, a formula. We have this saying, “It’s all right to have a song. But where does it actually live?” Like, in what atmosphere does it live in?

There are a lot of pretty heavy jams on this album. Some krautrocky moments, the Silver Apples…

They’re not jams, though…there’s no happy mistakes. I’d love to be the sort of band that goes in, jams the hell out of something and then just chops it up, like Can. But we’re just two people. It’s me and Ade staring at each other, going, “Well, who’s going to be Damo?”. I run a label in Bristol now (Invada), and I’ve been exposed to quite a lot of heavy music over the past few years, like Om. Maybe it’s not apparent that we’re into that kind of stuff on the record, but about two or three years ago I had an experience. I’d been in the music industry since I was 19, but I went to an OM gig, and it was like seeing Public Enemy when I was a teenager. It was that uncompromising kind of sound.

Tell me a bit more about the roles in the group. When does Beth Gibbons come into the process?

It’s changed a little bit over the years, because these days Beth will come in with a whole song or a guitar riff. Obviously, we’ve worked with Beth for years so it just sounds like Beth – but with this album it sounds like a frustration with society has crept into things this time, rather than personal frustration. The main thing for us was to not repeat ourselves, but still maintain the emotional element to what we do.

Your sound has changed quite a lot…

The whole kind of…writing a big string thing, and playing a Rhodes piano is just so obvious…if you want that, then listen to the early albums. I’m not saying that there isn’t a sense of beauty on this record, because hopefully there is – but maybe you’ve got to work a little harder to hear it.

Your first LP made a huge impact – how do you feel about it now?

I’m glad people dug it, and it’s allowed us to be free of a lot of pressure because we sold enough of them to be kind of slightly more…progressive, maybe. It’s allowed us a lot of artistic freedom. It’s all very positive – how it was absorbed into the mainstream was very peculiar. The idea of people having dinner parties with it, meant that the mood of the record was overlooked a bit, really. Because that wasn’t really very nice. It was absorbed – but I’m not going to be a music police and tell people how they should listen to it.

Can you see them having dinner parties to this one?

No, I doubt it, but it’s not a reaction to that, it’s just where we are. At the time, some people took Dummy back to Woolworths because it had scratches on it – everyone thought that was odd when they first heard it. Hopefully this will be the same.

INTERVIEW: JOHN ROBINSON

taken from http://www.uncut.co.uk/music/portishead/reviews/11429

Portishead Review by Corey DuBrowa

2008-05-12T06:21:00.000-07:00

A decade removed from reigning over trip-hop’s dark kingdom, Portishead returns with more uneasy listening

In the music industry’s accelerated calculus, 10 years can contain a lifetime’s worth of activity. Since Bristol, U.K., trip-hop trio Portishead released its eponymously titled studio album in 1997, we’ve observed the following earthly phenomena: a third of the music industry’s value erased since 2000, major labels on the endangered species list, the popularity explosion of digital file formats (thus dooming what were once quaintly known in the 20th century as “record stores”), the rise and fall of Britney Spears. It’s enough to give you vertigo.

Portishead may have taken an extended group hiatus, but it’s not as if its members made like Rip Van Winkle, sleeping through the millennial turnover only to awaken and find that trip-hop (gasp!) had essentially disappeared. Beth Gibbons, the group’s sonic doppelganger for Billie Holiday, released the spellbinding (if understated) 2002 album Out of Season in partnership with Talk Talk’s Paul “Rustin’ Man” Webb. And Portishead’s resident beat alchemist, Geoff Barrow, remixed tracks from Gravediggaz and The Pharcyde while producing The Coral’s fourth LP in partnership with official Portishead third wheel Adrian Utley, the band’s invisible jazzbo instrumentalist.

All of this converges to make Third (the group’s third studio effort) that much more unlikely and remarkable. Portishead’s version of trip-hop has always overweighted the “trip” quotient when compared to hip-hop worshipping contemporaries such as DJ Shadow, U.N.K.L.E. and fellow Bristolians Massive Attack and Tricky; Barrow was as likely to sample film-noir soundtracks or the minor-key orchestrations of Lalo Schifrin as he was to go cratedigging in the Eric B. & Rakim archives. And then there was Gibbons’ shadowy voice, which often sounded more like a sampled artifact than the rare grooves in which the band traded. Her voice gave Portishead’s music a wounded, heartsick quality that elevated it to an altitude safe from the passing fads of pop culture. Trip-hop may have died a quiet, timely death in the intervening years, but Gibbons’ otherworldly gift guaranteed that Portishead’s music would survive any drought with its soul largely intact.

Third is far and away the best, most punk thing in the Portishead catalog: a deeply transgressive album that bears a passing similarity to its predecessors but leaves most of the baggage behind in favor of a full-blown reset. It’s shocking enough to almost (but not quite) make you forget about the intoxicating “Sour Times,” from the band’s immortal 1994 debut Dummy. What Barrow and Gibbons have cooked up now ain’t no party, ain’t no disco, ain’t no fooling around. Third’s songs begin in a foreign tongue as though we’re accidentally walking in on a scene we’re not meant to see (the Portuguese soliloquy that opens “Silence”), they end without warning or are cut off in the rudest possible fashion (the tribal-sounding death knell “Nylon Smile”), and they strike Teutonic poses that seem more like Krautrock-meets-“Bela Lugosi’s Dead” (the devastating “We Carry On,” the electronic weaponry of “Machine Gun”) than the mood music for which Portishead is known.

And then things get really weird. “Magic Doors” finds Barrow clamping the DJ cans over his ears, pitching some carefully-selected funk groove down to its slowest possible speed, then ladling Gibbons’ sad-sack soul over the top of the steaming mass like the last of the Mrs. Butterworth’s before a distorted sax solo is pinned onto the donkey at the bitter end, as if Ornette Coleman had wandered into the room, given one heartfelt blast for old time’s sake, then departed just as suddenly as he arrived. “Deep Water” is 1:36 worth of musical feint: Gibbons backed by ukulele, with a weirdly slowed-down men’s barbershop chorus accompanying her as she squeaks out such uplifting sentiments as “I’m drifting in deep waters; alone with my self-doubt again.” Imagine Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters’ duet in The Jerk, “Tonight You Belong to Me,” performed while bombs fall around them and Armageddon approaches, and you’re more than halfway there.

The album’s closing track, “Threads,” is the one song that sounds the most like the group’s past work: a doomsday, b-movie symphony in which the brightest spot is Gibbons’ insistence that “I’m worn out thinking of ways; I’m always so unsure,” with the final 45 seconds devoted to gigantic, sweeping guitar swells that sound like some kind of air-raid warning system wailing over London. What Portishead has created is the post-modern blues: a manifesto for the new millennium, an appropriate response to a world that’s more fucked-up now than it was when the band went into hibernation. For Portishead, times are more sour than ever.

Written by Corey DuBrowa

taken from http://www.pastemagazine.com/action/article/7196/review/music/third

Portishead Third Review by Stephen Trousse

2008-05-09T05:45:00.000-07:00

When Geoff Barrow sparked a minor spat with Mark Ronson last summer, marvelling at the man's ability to “turn decent songs into shit funky supermarket muzak”, it wasn't hard to detect a certain reflexive disgust - a feeling only compounded when you delved further into the Portishead Myspace, and found the observation that “music like Dummy is being used to sell relaxation courses, and that makes me sick to the guts”.

You can see Barrow’s point: It's hard to think of any recent musical style that's suffered such a sharp plunge in its critical stock as trip hop - from adventurous British mash of blues and breakbeats to innocuous chill-out compilations in the space of a couple of series of This Life. More galling still, particularly for an old b-boy like Barrow, it was only when the genre reached its most absolutely anodyne – Dido – that it actually fed back into mainstream US hip hop, via Eminem's “Stan”.

An alternative, but no less insidious, fate may be the respectability accorded the elder statesman. 2008 is being heralded as the second coming of the Bristol scene, with new albums from Tricky, and fellow travellers Goldfrapp, and Massive Attack curating the Southbank's Meltdown Festival – a sign of that the cultural establishment think you reliable enough not to freak out the patrons of the Royal Festival Hall too much. In a sense, it's the dinner party soundtrack writ large.

The first indication that Portishead might elude both fates came with their own Nightmare Before Christmas festival last year. The combination of defiantly bleak venue (a Minehead holiday camp in the dark heart of December) and brilliantly esoteric line-up (from the the pioneering electronica of Silver Apples and the sepulchral folk of Hawk and Hacksaw, to the cosmic metal of Sunn O))), via the sadistic wit of Jerry Sadowitz), proved sufficiently traumatic to send at least one music editor fleeing after a single evening.

Barrow has claimed that the bands they invited to play were simply the ones that had inspired them to make Third – and amazingly it's not only true, but it works magnificently. If the first incarnation of Portishead was Lynchian neo-noir, a series of haunted dancehalls and guttering torch songs, now they've evolved into a kind of sci-fi horror. If Third were a movie it would be something like Children Of Men: an all too plausible world of everyday horror, random brutality, burnt-out cities and bleakly creepy countryside.

Lead single “Machine Gun”, makes this new mood most vivid. The brutal beat recalls an earlier Bristol sound: the industrial hip hop of Mark Stewart's Mafia and Tackhead – and beyond that, the sci-synth soundtracks of John Carpenter. Barrow also seems to have fallen for the very different grain of the early Fairlight sampler. Yet against this punishing rhythm Beth Gibbons sings the kind of eerily beautiful, desolate song that wouldn't seem out of place on an early Anne Briggs recording.Where once she was a mercurial, shapeshifting frontwoman, slipping in and out of masks of torchsong temptresses, on Third Gibbons mostly sticks to this one voice – beyond pastiche or persona, a bracing clear cold stream of English folk, that she first explored on her sublime 2002 Rustin Man collection. But it never sounds quaint. Indeed something about Third reminds me of Tim Buckley's Starsailor – a lucid dream of a possible future folk, some cosmic deep-song.

Just as on Starsailor “Moulin Rouge” is an oddly innocent interlude, Third has “Deep Waters”, a simple ukulele shanty, sung by a shipwrecked soul, backed by what sounds like a Zombie barbershop quartet. But it's a rare moment of light. More characteristic is “Silence”, opening the album with chase-scene urgency (Barrow says it was inspired by the idea of James Brown playing at the Rumble in the Jungle in Zaire, 1974), before Gibbons strikes her keynote of implacable grief: “Empty in our hearts / crying out in silence... / Did you know what I lost? / Did you know what I wanted?”.

Adrian Utley proves to be the key player through much of the record. Where once he was the model of session man discretion and style, picking out lines as elegant as Morricone, here his playing is frequently awe-inspiring. “Plastic” is one of a couple of songs that could have appeared on the earlier records, but it's capsized by a huge wail of distorted guitar roaring out of the middle of the track, of the kind that generally appears on Scott Walker's recent records. Throughout Utley seems to have picked up the thrilling discordance that Johnny Greenwood has lately channeled out of Radiohead and into his soundtracks.

This howl is tempered by the clunking funk of primitive electronica, a kind of disturbed cousin to Broadcast's radiophonic lullabies. “We Carry On” blatantly borrows from the Silver Apples's “Oscillations”, but in place of their machines of loving grace, the Moogs feel martial as Gibbons sings with halting, hunted urgency: “the pace of time - I can't survive/ It's grinding down the view... / breaking out - which way to choose? / a choice - I can't refuse” . It's awesome and faintly terrifying, like one of Emily Dickinson's more kosmiche moments.

The opening moments of the record feature a crackling sample of some character from an old Brazilian film, a speech which translate as advice to “Beware the rule of three”. This could have been a witty, self-deprecating disclaimer, warning of typical third album creative bankruptcy. Instead it provides fair warning that Third is the most stunning, stark and superb Portishead album yet.

STEPHEN TROUSSÉ

taken from http://www.uncut.co.uk/music/portishead/reviews/11429

Portishead Third Review

2008-05-07T05:31:00.000-07:00

What has been roughly ten years in the making finally sees release in the form of Third, the aptly titled release from the Bristol-based trio known in part for helping standardize trip hop in the mid ’90s. With the exception of a few scattered contributions and a Beth Gibbons solo album the group has been largely unspoken for in commercial recording since its 1997 self titled release, ever since mystique and anticipation have blossomed around the band’s absence. Now releasing an album of new material, matching its first two releases with an eleven song tracklist, Third may act as a question rather than an answer to the band’s layoff. Not only does Third’s release question whether or not Portishead is still a relevant in a changed musical landscape, but it also suggests asking whether or not the trip hop Chinese Democracy was simply worth the wait.

Performing its first full set in roughly a decade at last year’s All Tomorrow’s Parties: A Nightmare Before Christmas festival the group presented five new, and at the time yet-untitled, tracks. Capturing the interest of fans the world over, the new material was received with a stark feeling of separation when contrasted with of the sounds of both Dummy and Portishead. The thoughts of a music departure are quite suitable, for to call the new music trip hop would be a disgrace to both what the term came to represent and to the honest beauty of the variation in Portishead’s sound visibly apparent with Third.

“I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve you and I don’t know what I’ll do without you” moans Gibbons on “Nylon Smile.” Almost serving as an echoing conclusion to ’97s “Only You,” Gibbons now plays the role of a songstress who has achieved her romantic grasping. Much in the same sense, Third seems to repeal any bloated stabs at grandeur which may be expected, rather its tracks are heavy with reaching innovation and variety in place of excessive beathugging.

“The Rip” blooms with a stench of cheap ’90s ambiance, accounting for a sound that could be construed as appropriate of the album if out of the context of the rest of its songs. But its sound grows appropriately while consoling Gibbons’ lyrics, adjusting to their delicateness in a way that Air’s denser electronic may have melded with Charlotte Gainsbourg had her 5:55 taken a different direction. Likewise the track’s following sounds further shed any idea of repetition between this and any other Portishead album; “Plastic” determined in its minimalist orchestral texture, and “We Carry On” sounding of deceiving gypsy with Adrian Utley’s guitar acting as a deceptive monkey scouring for unguarded pocket change.

And as the album continues to relax, “Deep Water” surprises as a ukulele-driven ballad, waxing just before Third chomps with “Machine Gun.” The song’s Downward Spiral beat provides a uniquely hard shell, an environment surprisingly suitable for the harmonically quenching Gibbons. Its beat unfolds into a psudo-industrialist electronic rhythm, one a bit too basic to be a Squarepusher anthem, though it teases some of Tom Jenkinson’s earlier subtleties.

Perhaps “Threads” is as close to what was last heard from Portishead, post-Portishead. The song’s early violin moan captures a hair of what was 1998’s live Roseland NYC album, Utley and Geoff Barrow adding haze to the transparent sound. “I’m always so unsure” groans Gibbons as “Threads” begins to wail, possibly attributing a few words to the theme to not just the album but the group’s prolonged recording hiatus. When so much is expected of a band so talented, yet so remotely unusual, uncertainty is not merely granted but presumed; however Third as a solid body of work fulfills in its surprising assuredness, failing to even whisper suggestions that Portishead was ever irrelevant. Third is ten years worth of anticipation fulfilled.

taken from http://www.culturebully.com/portishead-third-review

Portishead positive despite delay

2008-04-18T12:18:00.000-07:00

The band won the 1995 Mercury Prize for debut Dummy
A member of British band Portishead has spoken of the long delay in finishing their new album, Third, but that it was a "positive" experience.

Guitarist Adrian Utley told the BBC the group were exhausted after completing a world tour in 1998.

Utley said the group did not want to repeat the sound of their first two albums on the new record, released 10 years after their last album.

He said the band "went into meltdown" after the tour had finished.

'Long time'

But he said despite the delays in finishing the record - completed after four years of sessions amid the band members' other projects - it was "a positive experience", especially compared with recording second album, 1997's Portishead.

He said: "With the second record, it was a hellish time - this wasn't a hellish time. It just took a long time."

The Bristol-based trio, which also includes singer Beth Gibbons and multi-instrumentalist Geoff Barrow, released debut album Dummy in 1994.

The album, which featured spy film strings, theremins and samples from esoteric soundtracks amid breakbeats and DJ scratches, won them the Mercury Prize in 1995 and popularised the languid sound of trip-hop.

But after recording their second album and releasing a live album, Utley said the band reached a creative block.

Portishead in Bristol (taken by Orynthia Thomas)
The band have played only sporadically since 1998
"

"There was pressure internally - there was a sense of 'got to get it done, got to get it done'.

"We went on to do a huge tour for a year and headlined loads of festivals because The Verve had split up that year. It was insanity really."

He said: "It was ridiculously full on, considering we wanted to play to 500 people."

Both Utley and Barrow split from their wives after recording sessions for Third started.

"Those years were quite dark from then on," he added.

"There was possibly a time where I thought we might not get it done. But it wasn't the dominating thought over those four years."

The new album, the band's third studio LP, will be released on 28 April.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7295227.stm

Did Portishead kill trip hop?

2008-04-18T12:10:00.000-07:00

The moody British band is back, but they've ditched sensual black grooves and embraced their inner goth.
By James Hannaham

April 17, 2008 | Trip hop died on April 29, 2008, in Portishead, North Somerset, England, after a long illness. The coroner listed the musical genre's cause of death as acute gloom as well as a severe deficiency of sexiness and Afro-Caribbean influence. Its funeral was conducted by Geoff Barrow, a beat maestro with a penchant for spy soundtracks, and Beth Gibbons, a chanteuse with a quivery vibrato, two members of the group Portishead, named after the town where Barrow grew up. The funeral service has been released in the form of a CD by the band, titled "Third."

Trip hop's parents always hated it -- especially the deep, bumping rhythm section that made it popular background music in restaurants, lounges and hipster bedrooms. Its main practitioners felt that audiences would take trip hop more seriously if they removed these elements. Gradually they deprived the genre of black grooves and strangled it with white goth. Not until "Third," however, did the genre make a decisive move into middle Europe, taking on German and Eastern European elements.

Trip hop, also known as "the Bristol Sound," was born in the U.K. city of Bristol in 1993. Bands like Massive Attack (for whom the young Barrow worked as an engineer, making tea for them as they recorded "Blue Lines") began mixing hip-hop samples and beats with a slower, more experimental dance music called "dub" that rose up out of the instrumental flip sides of reggae singles. Trip hop combined minimal vocal tracks with bass-heavy, slow and sensuous rhythms that recalled reggae and rap settings, sometimes building a song around a sample, usually adding snippets of guitar, synthesizers, film dialogue and other random cool sounds.

Massive Attack spawned the genre's most highly regarded practitioner, Tricky, an unpredictable man with a very scratchy voice, a talent as a curator of pop, soul and world music, and a beautiful singing muse, Martina Topley-Bird (who went on to release a fine record of her own, "Anything," in 2004). In 1995 Tricky released "Maxinquaye," named for his late mother, a funky and mysterious album that proved one of the high points of trip hop.

"Dummy," Portishead's 1994 debut, broke a taboo that set the music world alight -- white Brits unself-consciously cribbing from hip-hop. It might not seem unusual now, but back then, Eminem was still an unknown New Jack, and the Beastie Boys were the only white rappers with street cred. Assisted by jazz guitarist Adrian Utley, P-head merged phat drum sounds with torch songs and film noir soundtracks. Their creepy but sensual blend proved compelling enough to grab that year's Mercury Prize, as well as a loyal following in the U.S.

Along with their success, Barrow and Gibbons developed a reputation for shyness with the press and seemed stupefied by their popularity. In what seemed to some like an effort to avoid the twin pillars of Barrow's anxiety -- praise and sales --the baby was tossed out with the bath water. A less sexy, more dissonant and inaccessible second LP, "Portishead," emerged in 1997. "All Mine," the highlight of that album, was a brassy, swinging tune reminiscent of a James Bond theme. After releasing a live album in 1998, they fell into a decade-long silence.

In the meantime, trip hop lost its juice. Tricky's global mélange began to shed the influences of black American and lower-hemisphere music. His latest releases -- like the recent single "Council Estate" -- have emphasized his punk influences. Similarly, Massive Attack lost most of their members and forsook the groove. Their 2003 album "100th Window" sounded more like an answer to the post-punk atmospherics of early '80s bands like Bauhaus.

By the turn of the millennium, it seemed as if the genre's last hope was an album representing a return to blackness from one of its main progenitors. By turning away from dance music, Africa and the Americas, this music no longer promised cross-cultural understanding through musical cross-pollination. In the last 10 years, trip hop managed to ignore the massive influence of beat masters like Timbaland and Rodney Jerkins; younger acts like Basement Jaxx and M.I.A. picked up the torch of polyglot dance music and prevented it from being extinguished.

Portishead's "Third" finally severs all ties from anything remotely black or cosmopolitan, aside from a couple of breakbeats. Its extravagance, repetitiveness and gloom make the album Euro and Romantic enough to sound, at times, like high camp. When they prepare to take this set of dirges on tour, Gibbons and Barrow will need a truckload of lace and black lipstick.

A monotonous breakbeat throbs. Barrow adds synths that bring to mind theremins and Farfisa organs -- the stuff of 1950s horror movies -- even the theme from "The Munsters." Gibbons begins to groan, her voice ghostly and nearly operatic. "Tormented inside," she sings. "Wounded and afraid inside my head." This describes only the first song, "Silence." Similar tracks recall a variety of mopey and/or industrial groups from the '80s -- Joy Division, Dead Can Dance, sometimes even Eastern European provocateurs Laibach.

Tapping the shallows of their despair, the group weaves in bummed-out folk tunes like "Hunter," "The Rip" and "Deep Water," which set Gibbons' dreary delivery against Spanish guitars or mandolins with the reverb cranked to give the impression that she is singing inside an empty church or a lonely culvert. Gibbons urges herself to conquer her fear of drowning. Listeners who have not decided to drown themselves by the end of that track should grit their teeth for "Machine Gun," whose beat sounds a lot like -- guess what? More accurately, the weapon in question seems to have been re-created on an 808 drum machine by the noise-punk band Einst¨rtzende Neubauten -- those guys who used to play shopping carts onstage.

Gibbons' trembling voice used to sound bluesy and erotic --"It Could Be Sweet," from their debut, could have been pillow talk verbatim. On the second record, she often threw in a vampy, nasal quality that cut the generally depressive tone with a touch of humor. What singer could take herself seriously while doing a Shirley Bassey impression? On "Third," Gibbons takes herself entirely too seriously, moving between a whispery, disaffected moan and a fluttery, anxious whine. She always sounds powerless, like she's about to burst into tears. The folky numbers, like "Hunter," have a very listenable, austere atmosphere, but not a sensual one -- Portishead has lured you and your partner to their dark Transylvanian castle, but you'll be sleeping in separate quarters.

Gibbons' lyrics used to suggest an assertive, liberated attitude. She closed out "Dummy" demanding a reason to be a woman; on "Elysium," from "Portishead," she insists, "You can't deny how I feel/ And you can't decide for me!" On "Third," however, she treats her indecisiveness like a torment on the level of psychosis -- a one-dimensional, even stereotypical, view of womanhood as equivocal and weak. "I'm always so unsure!" she laments on the album's dismal closer, "Threads," like someone about to throw herself off a bridge because she cannot afford a life coach.

The album's final sound effect is a full minute of low, distorted and bent guitar, ringing out like a foghorn. It sounds ominous, which is cool, but its meaning lacks anything pleasurable. It only signifies, over and over, that you have just listened to a really grim pop album -- in case you weren't sure. This final sound wipes away the sorts of things that make music worth listening to and life worthwhile -- playfulness, sensuality, complexity, hope and perspective. It argues that existence offers nothing but doubt and misery. Worse, Gibbons tries to prove that doubt is misery.

Wallowing certainly has its pleasures, and "Third" does a good job of encouraging those, but they ought to remain brief and private. Trip hop could never have saved the world from despair, but it did promise inclusiveness, slow dancing, sex, relaxation, pot smoking, etc., as respites from despair -- all things that "Third" has laid to rest under that dearly departed genre's tombstone.

http://www.salon.com/ent/music/review/2008/04/17/portishead/index.html?source=rss&aim=/ent/music/review

Portishead Reveal Third Single, Box Set Details

2008-03-28T00:13:00.000-07:00

They seem like such non-violent types, but Portishead will bring out the heavy artillery with the release of the first single from their much-anticipated new album, Third. "Machine Gun" is the tune the trio chose for the single, and it makes its radio and download debut today, March 18.

In a matter of minutes, at 7:30 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time, Zane Lowe will premiere "Machine Gun" on his BBC Radio 1 show, and it will simultaneously become available for download through the band's official website. The single will also be released in the UK on etched, one-sided 12" vinyl, April 14 via Island.

Third will be released on April 28 in the UK (via Island) and April 29 in the U.S. (via Mercury). A limited edition box set version of the album will also be available on April 28, to the first 10,000 people who order it from the Portishead website.

Here are the box set's contents:

- double vinyl copy of Third- etched "Machine Gun" 12"

- limited edition art print by Nick Uff

- "P"-shaped USB stick featuring Third and four films (Ade's House, Machine Gun; The Rip Live @ Mr. Wolfe's; We Carry On; and The Truly Spectacular Universal Conference Film) and offering exclusive access to other extras to be unveiled throughout the year.

Portishead:

03-26 Porto, Portugal - Coliseum *

03-27 Lisbon, Portugal - Coliseum *

03-30 Milan, Italy - Alcatraz *

03-31 Florence, Italy - Sashall *

04-02 Munich, Germany - Tonhalle #

04-03 Berlin, Germany - Columbiahalle #
04-04 Copenhagen, Denmark - KB Halle #

04-06 Cologne, Germany - Palladium #

04-07 Amsterdam, Netherlands - HMH #

04-09 Manchester, England - Apollo *

04-10 London, England - Hammersmith Apollo *

04-12 Edinburgh, Scotland - Corn Exchange *

04-13 Wolverhampton, England - Civic *

04-17 London, England - Brixton Academy *

04-26 Indio, CA - Empire Polo Field (Coachella)

05-05 Paris, France - Zenith #

05-06 Paris, France - Zenith #

05-08 Brussels, Belgium - Forest National #

05-29-31 Barcelona, Spain - Parc del Fòrum (Primavera Sound)

* with A Hawk and a Hacksaw

# with Kling Klang

taken from http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/news/49348-portishead-reveal-ithirdi-single-box-set-details

Portishead 3 Light in the west

2008-03-27T04:03:00.000-07:00

An exclusive interview by Ben Thompson
Sunday February 17, 2008 Observer

It has been 10 years since the world last heard from Portishead, when TV producers 'turned our sounds into a fondue set'. A stunning new album could even herald the rebirth of the Bristol scene.

This is how the new Portishead album starts. A friendly voice says something vaguely introductory in Brazilian-Portuguese. There's a bit of subdued chatter in the background, and the reassuring plink of a distant piano, as if you're arriving at a half-empty Latin nightclub. Then a huge pummelling beat comes in (Geoff Barrow insists that he was 'massively unhappy' with this rhythm for many long months, but it sounds pretty unstoppable now). Sawing strings summon up a demonic echoing cowbell, before this in turn gives way to ominous slashes of spaghetti western guitar - the sort of thing you'd expect to hear just before a hired gun played by Lee Van Cleef accidentally shoots an innocent child.

Two minutes and 10 seconds in, the scene is finally set for Beth Gibbons's vocal to make its entrance. But however effectively the listener has been softened up for this momentous event, no one will quite be prepared for the pitch of ecstatic anguish at which her voice announces itself. 'Wounded and afraid inside my head,' Beth flails poignantly, as a Tardis seems to take off in the background, 'falling through changes ... Did you know what I lost? Do you know what I wanted?'

It's stunning stuff. And this is just the opening number. Later on, once Third (for that is the title: it is, after all, Portishead's third album - well, if you don't count the live one) is properly up and running, it features a run of five or six songs which are not just worthy of the records this band were making 10 or even 14 years ago, but feel like the sonic destination which they were always meant to arrive at.

Being amazed by the music of Portishead was not an activity at the top of many people's agendas for 2008. A couple of years ago, when this slow-moving West Country ensemble tentatively emerged from retirement by contributing a track to a poorly conceived English-language Serge Gainsbourg tribute LP, they sounded like a band on the verge of total creative exhaustion. When checking in with Barrow's blog in the run-up to December's comeback as curators of the more-underground-than-thou ATP festival at Minehead Butlins, the omens were no more propitious. 'This album has been like watching Lost,' he pronounced gloomily, 'a never-ending journey with few answers.'

'Wish we had more time,' he yearns poignantly at another juncture. And why shouldn't he? It's only been 10 years since their last record, after all. What you might call Bacardi advert time-frames have always been an issue with the music made in this part of the world, however vehemently those responsible might protest otherwise. And with Tricky and Massive Attack also poised to release new albums, perennial late starters Portishead find themselves in the unaccustomed position of being first out of the blocks.

Far from being unnerved by his band's decade-long shore leave, genially rumpled bed-head poster-boy Barrow seems to view it in an entirely positive light. 'Over that 10-year period,' he explains, 'the pressure to have successful records obviously dies. Which is really good, as then you can just do what you want.'

The home studio on the top floor of Portishead guitarist Adrian Utley's five-storey Georgian house in the classy district of Kingsdown supplies an abundance of circumstantial evidence as to how that decade might have been spent.

A lovely old harmonium Utley bought off eBay for £29 squats elegantly in one corner. In another, there's an ancient synthesiser signed by its designer, recently deceased musical pioneer Bob Moog. Anyone who has even a passing familiarity with Portishead's bespoke blend of antique futurism and ambient savagery would expect them to inhabit a world full of lovely-looking musical instruments. But there's an intensity to the atmosphere in this room which suggests it's home to a band who care about substance more than style.

'We've had some dark moments in here,' admits the usually ebullient Utley. 'Discussing things for hours to try and make the world around the music completely solid, then listening back to stuff and not liking it, and then not listening to it and talking for hours about biscuits.'

The vista that unfolds across the long picture window above the giant wooden mixing-desk - a breathtaking view down the slope to Bristol's notoriously unsatisfactory city centre (of which more later) and beyond to the green hills in the distance - would grab the attention of even the most sceptical observer. Whatever the precise explanation for Portishead's unlikely creative renaissance, it seems probable that the complex relationship between this panoramic backdrop and the essential privacy of the band's notoriously complicated recording process is going to be somewhere near the heart of it.

When a lot of exciting music emerges from one place at roughly the same time, it doesn't usually take long for the things people say in the hope of capturing this excitement to start looking foolish. Whether it's Newport being the new Seattle, or Sunderland being the old Sheffield, the onward march of rock'n'roll history soon tends to tramp down such proudly regionalist boasts into a kind of hyperbolic mulch.

In the case of the 'Bristol sound' of the early-to-mid-1990s, however, the idea that something special happened at that particular time and in that particular place has grown more persuasive rather than less with the passing years. This is partly because the music has lasted so well - listening to Massive Attack's Blue Lines, Portishead's Dummy and Tricky's Maxinquaye a decade and a bit later, it's impossible to deny that these are three of the most resonant and perfectly-formed debut albums to emerge in over 50 years of British pop.

The particular circumstances of growing up in that city in the Eighties - from the endless social ramifications of Bristol's historic connections with slavery, to the fallout from an especially euphoric punky-reggae crossover, the enduring influence of art-school polemicists the Pop Group, and the shared hip-hop heritage of the Dug Out Club and the Wild Bunch sound-system - helped shape a uniquely cosmopolitan culture which the rest of Britain recognised but could not hope to emulate. And at a time when the kind of sophistication a broadband connection or a nationwide Italian-style coffee franchise brings are equally accessible to everyone, the idea of such a distinct mindset now seems almost impossibly mysterious.

Yet speaking to all the major players in this story as it was unfolding, it soon became clear that what divided them was every bit as important as what they had in common. 'Everyone thinks we're all sleeping together,' Blue Lines's puckish featured rapper Tricky Kid murmured to me in 1994, before bemoaning the fact that while he was working on his first solo endeavour (a contribution, as it happened, to a benefit project for research into sickle-cell anaemia), all the full-time members of Massive Attack 'came back from the pub to take the piss'. And while acknowledging that his band represented 'the first generation of immigrants that grew up in England', in conversation Massive stalwart Daddy G was quick to emphasise that 'you can't say that living here has affected us all in the same way, because it hasn't'.

Perhaps inevitably, two of the clearest and most commercially successful paths through the Bristol scene's forest of inter-personal connections were trodden by white kids. Nellee Hooper jumped ship from the Wild Bunch sound-system to become first one half of Soul II Soul, and then (for a while at least: no one seems to know what he's up to at the moment) the world's most sought after record-producer. And Barrow - teenage tea-maker and tape operator at the Coach House studios where Massive Attack recorded Blue Lines - went on first to co-produce Tricky's solo debut, and then to start his own group, named (in classic hip hop-style) after the town he'd grown up in.

The fact that this place - Portishead - was neither an LA ghetto nor a suburb of New York but a no-horse satellite town of Bristol, clinging on to the edge of the Severn Estuary by its scabby fingernails, was a reality which Barrow has scrupulously refused to overlook from that day to this. In his quest to make music which was informed by the American hip hop he loved, but also true to the place it came from, he enlisted two somewhat unlikely allies. One, Beth Gibbons, was a singer-songwriter almost a decade his senior. The other, Adrian Utley, was a veteran jazz guitarist who was rumoured to have once played with Art Blakey.

Because it's simpler, people have tended to see the subsequent development of Portishead's music as a straightforward tug of war between rough-edged cut-and-paste merchant Barrow, and Gibbons the enigmatic chanteuse. In fact, the band's creative power-base has always been more of a triangle; the atmospheric sound-scapes don't really make sense without a proper understanding of Utley's contribution.

The great thing about this apparently ill-matched trio was that each person brought something to the table that the others needed: Gibbons's striking vocal and visual presence and old-school song-writing talent, Barrow's fan-boy grasp of the mechanics of hip hop, and Utley's musicianly chops.

'Because we came from such different worlds,' Utley remembers, 'what really got me and Geoff talking to each other first was Public Enemy. As I'd come from a traditional playing-with-other-people type of background, I didn't know how these records were being made. I'd never had a sampler - they were really expensive at the time - so I just didn't understand where these amazing sounds were coming from.'

'With samples, in those days,' he continues - 'Before time-stretching and all this Pro Tools tomfoolery,' qualifies Barrow, ever the home-schooled rap technician - 'you were actually forcing notes against notes, so there was a proper clash and everything was slightly out of tune. Because you want this riff to go over that beat and you've just got to make it happen, you end up with this kind of roughness, which is what made Public Enemy or Eric B so exciting.'

'For me,' adds the older man, 'finding hip hop was a huge life-changing experience - like having a baby or something'. Even as he says this, Utley's 14-month-old daughter is taking some of her first steps across the wooden floorboards of the downstairs kitchen. And just as this road-hardened jazz-warrior was first discovering hip-hop's 'whole world of fantasticness', he toddled into Barrow coming back the other way.

Years of immersion in the crate-digging one-upmanship of DJ culture were making the younger man increasingly uncomfortable with hip hop's 'trainspotting tendencies'. And what better way to transcend your disenchantment with 'people getting excited about the first two bars of some beat that sounds like it was played at Butlins' than by forging a new creative partnership with someone who might have helped keep that beat? When Barrow was holidaying at Torbay Pontins as a child in the very early Eighties ('We never went to Butlins - it was too posh'), Utley was actually playing in the band.

Portishead were painfully aware of the embarrassment that can ensue when white musicians try to appropriate black musical innovations wholesale - 'We didn't want to be Cliff Richard singing over a loop of "Funky Drummer",' Barrow almost snarls (Bristol's biggest venue, the Colston Hall, might still be named after a slave-trader, but that's all the more reason for the city's artists to eschew a colonial mentality). So they set themselves the challenge of incorporating a sense of that distance from their source material into the very fabric of their music. 'It can't just be like a live tape played by a load of musicians,' Utley explains, 'it has to feel like it's already a record of something, like it's come from a world.'

The band's determination to be true to this underlying principle has necessitated a uniquely painstaking process of artistic evolution. Each time they've proved a particular way of doing things can work for them, they seem to feel compelled to tear up that rulebook. Thus, when making Dummy, Barrow would record a combination of samples and live music, press them on to vinyl, then scratch-mix the results to make backing tapes for Gibbons to add lyrics and a tune to. But for 1997's Portishead this methodology was no longer deemed tortuous enough, so the band invested endless months in creating their own samples from, as it were, scratch. ('We couldn't just put the needle on a record and take someone else's music,' Barrow grins painedly, 'and besides, it was more fun to do it ourselves.')

At the time, Utley described this process as being 'like trying to walk with one Wellington boot full of concrete', but Portishead's endless labours received their just reward in the end. Not commercially (the second album sold less than the first), but in the loftier realm of kudos. When 'Over' was sampled by both Timbaland and Wu-Tang Clan's RZA, Barrow had achieved his ultimate objective of giving something back: supplying actual fuel for hip hop's hungry furnace.

Small wonder that Portishead - like their increasingly fractured and discontented peers Massive Attack and Tricky - were running out of steam by the end of the Nineties. Geoff Barrow looks worn-out even having to think about this stage of his band's history. 'After we got back and mixed the live album [1998's impeccably grandiose Roseland NYC Live - probably, strangely, the best place to start for people unfamiliar with their previous oeuvre] we didn't really get together for six years ... It wasn't that we weren't speaking. But Beth got ill and moved back to Devon for a while. I got divorced, and we all worked on a few solo projects.'

The smart money, at this stage, would not have been on Portishead's most sonically adventurous and exhilarating work still being ahead of them. And when they finally got back together, things - to put it mildly - took a while to get going. 'I bought hundreds and hundreds of records,' Barrow remembers, glumly, 'sampled them, looped them up and made backing tracks ... and it just put me into a massive state of depression, basically.'

Why?

'It just seemed so backward, and like something we'd done too many times. The songs sounded OK as instrumental hip hop, but as soon as Beth started singing, it was like "Oh man, no way". The idea of us just trying to be Gang Starr with Beth on top just was not really interesting to any of us any more - her included. We ended up going back to early hip hop drum machines, because they were the only things we could really stand listening to. The idea of classic breaks that had been chopped up was not really palatable any more.'

The roots of Barrow's allergic reaction to the sounds he once loved probably lay in the unasked-for ubiquity of his band's debut album. At some point around the time Dummy won the 1995 Mercury Prize, Portishead found that the music they had lovingly fashioned from scraps of Lalo Schifrin's old film scores had suddenly (when featured in the background on aspirational twenty-something TV drama This Life) become the soundtrack to a mid-Nineties media lifestyle fantasy.

'They turned our songs into a fondue set,' he observes, disgustedly, more than a decade on. The same anger was on public display in his recent entertaining blog-spat with Mark Ronson, in which he accused the well-connected New Yorker of making 'shit funky supermarket muzak', eliciting a pithy but intriguingly off-target response about Portishead's music no longer being 'popular enough to be played in supermarkets' (an eventuality which actually seems to be a great source of relief to the whole band).

Barrow and Utley seem to agree that one of Third's subliminal themes is the 'ridiculousness' of contemporary existence. 'You've got the surface world - the absolute unreal world that everyone is supposed to live in - and then there are the actual real things that are happening, and then there's this ginormous layer of media which divides the two,' Barrow fulminates sheepishly, as if conscious that he has expressed this dilemma more elegantly in musical form. It's a neat demonstration of the contrasting personalities which give the music of Portishead its light and shade that when the topic of This Life comes up while he and Utley are chatting to photographer Harry Borden at the OMM photo shoot, Beth Gibbons pipes up from the other corner of the room: 'Oh, I always quite liked that show!'

Under normal circumstances, this would be the only quote from the notoriously reticent vocalist that would be available to us. Happily, in the course of my previous professional encounter with Portishead, in late 1994, a sudden indisposition on the part of Barrow (who'd been hospitalised with a suspected ulcer) caused Gibbons to lift her lifetime ban on talking to British journalists for the only time. Far from the Garboesque recluse of legend, she turned out to be a genial, no-nonsense character, wearing glasses and speaking with a light Devonian burr rather than a tortured croak. After rooting through a cupboard in her small terraced house in the Easton district of Bristol, she unearthed a series of unreleased Portishead songs and played them back with a self-deprecating running commentary - 'This is where I tried to rip off Sinead O'Connor' - or 'Neil Young', or 'Tom Waits' or 'a black soul singer'. Yet it seemed the harder Beth Gibbons tried to copy someone else, the more she sounded like no one but herself.

Before giving me a lift back to the station in her elegantly battered Triumph, with a pre-release copy of Maxinquaye on the stereo, Gibbons said a couple of things which enhanced her band's air of mystery far more effectively than any long-term vow of silence.

The first was that even though in some ways the loneliness which had driven her to write songs in the first place had been intensified by sending that music out into the world as a commercial product, 'if you think of something like the mannequins in Blade Runner, they only think they're human because of the pictures they hold'. The second - rather less existential, but none the less intriguing - observation concerned her relationship with Barrow.

'It may be the age gap, but he never quite knows how to take me,' she said, of the musical associate she'd first teamed up with at an enterprise allowance induction day three years earlier. 'If you asked him about me, I don't know what he'd say.'

Fourteen years later, Barrow discusses their initial meeting in similarly uncertain tones: 'She was a woman, but I was still just a boy really. I mean, the lyrics she'd written for the first song we worked on together name-checked Gandhi! I just did not have the first idea of what she was on about.'

In the intervening years, the distance between Portishead's ruling triumvirate has greatly decreased. 'We're closer now than we've ever been,' insists Utley, 'and the lines between what each of us contributes have totally blurred.' The way the band works has basically turned inside out. And you can feel the ensuing emotional thaw in the music on Third. In place of the old demarcations, there's now the sense of a rush towards a shared objective.

Some of this extra momentum comes from the beats. Take the percussive thrust of the album's opening track, for example. 'The vibe I really wanted,' Barrow explains, 'was when Muhammad Ali fought George Foreman at the Rumble in the Jungle and James Brown played. I wanted it to feel like it had been recorded somewhere really fucking remote.' But there's a further source of additional energy at work, one which (for Geoff at least) comes close to matching the intensity of his earlier connection with the hip hop mother lode.

'If you look back at the ATP line-up,' Geoff enthuses, 'it's basically a list of the music that makes our album.' Given that this three-day event traditionally offers a bill of fare so ascetic that even hardened readers of the Wire magazine are inclined to want to listen to Diana Ross and the Supremes in the car on the way home, readers could be forgiven for feeling somewhat unnerved by the prospect of Portishead's new doom-metal direction. But listening to Third, the sheer savagery of the album's numerous sonic switchbacks seems to have also shaken free the band's melodic sense as well.

The first three songs are something like you'd expect from a new Portishead album. They're kind of the same, but different - like arriving at the airport and having to carry your toothpaste through passport control in a plastic bag. But then the record really takes off, and suddenly it's taking you somewhere you've never been before.

A tune called 'The Rip' starts out like an old English folk remnant but ends up in the enchanted realm of early Kraftwerk. Another amazing song, 'We Carry On', joins the dots between the ramshackle urgency of Sixties punk and the terrifying precision of Joy Division. And let's not forget 'Deep Water' (which Utley hates): it's the most touching Steve Martin-inspired close-harmony ukulele ballad in Portishead's entire repertoire.

Back up in Portishead's rooftop eyrie, Adrian Utley points out places of local interest through the window: 'Nellee Hooper came from Barton Hill, over there, which is not a fairytale place to live. Tricky was from Knowle, which is pretty grim as well, and Mushroom lived in Fishponds.' At this point, talk turns to Bristol's endlessly postponed city-centre redevelopment.

There's a school of thought which believes that Tony Wilson's Factory Records dreamt up the Manchester of the 21st century. Can either Barrow or Utley imagine a metropolitan hub inspired by Dummy or Maxinquaye

'I don't know what that would look like,' the former grins, 'but it would be fairly frightening, I reckon.' At this point, a courier arrives with a freshly remastered copy of Third, and Barrow sticks it into the CD player and strains his ears to assess the impact of another set of infinitesimal adjustments. If Massive Attack's and Tricky's forthcoming albums sound anything like as good as this one, well, Bristol just might be the new Bristol.

· Third (Island) is out on 14 April; Portishead also tour that month.

taken from http://music.guardian.co.uk/rock/story/0,,2256187,00.html

Portishead Third Review

2008-03-14T21:09:00.000-07:00

During the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in Minehead England in December 2007, Portishead played their first full live set in 10 years, featuring five new songs - “Hunter”, “Machine Gun”, “Wicca” (retitled as “Silence”) “Mystic” (retitled as “The Rip”) and “Peaches” (retitled as “We Carry On”) which appear on Third.The album was leaked onto torrent sites in its entirety and in high quality (320kbps). I’ve listening to the album during most of the day while a winter storm furiously beats down snowfall and searing winds. It’s haunting, incredible, modern, dark and moody. Beth Gibbons’ haunting voice still evokes incredible emotions.

I’ve got no idea why Third was leaked onto the internet. Millions of fans are waiting for this album. It will be a success. It will go quadruple platinum. Portishead will go on another whirlwind tour of the world, playing to sold out venues and stadiums all over the place. Gibbons, Barrow and Utley came out with a masterpiece. I didn’t know what to expect when I got this album. I’ve started listening to Tricky and the old trip-hop crew once more.

This takes me back to March 1998 when I saw Portishead live in Montreal, Canada. I couldn’t get tickets and paid 50$ for scalped tickets. It was well worth the money and I enjoyed an incredible show. I remember that they were playing two nights in a row. I almost went to the second show, but in the end decided against it. That year, I saw Tricky, Björk, Blur, Prodigy and a whole bunch of others.

For a band that defined the trip-hop genre when it started in Bristol, this album is hard to categorize. One thing that I’ve learned with my eclectic music tastes is to stop trying to do this. Anyone who enjoyed Portishead in the past will enjoy this album.

This album incorporates a lot of samples and synthesizers which might put off some fans. Drum tracks meld seamlessly with violins and pianos.

The new Portishead album will be released on the 29th of April 2008, almost eleven years since their last album Portishead. The album was written and composed from 2005 to 2007.

Right of the bat, The Rip and Magic Doors strike me as really great songs. The Rip starts out as an acoustic sounding ballad, but is transformed into live-drummed piece in which Gibbons’ characteristic “oooooh” extends for up to 30 seconds at a time over melodic and oscillating Moog patterns.

Third begins with rolling drum pattern that sounds muddled. Sequences are assembled and pushed along. Violins and a surfer guitar are added. A strange off tuned guitar laments while Gibbons’ voice only appears as the track nearly fades, almost halfway through. Gibbons’ voice is modified and instantly brings back memories of their past. Silence ends with a melody played by the off tune guitar, that finally manages to be in slightly in tune. A quartet or an orchestra of strings join in for good measure. Simply delectable. The song ends so abruptly, that you might wonder if this was intended.

Hunter starts off with a slower and moody pace. The refrain appears to be almost off key, but it fits in well with the rest of the song. This song is an evolution of the Portishead’s Dummy sound.

The Rip begins with the soft acoustic melody played on guitar starts and Gibbons’ moody and distinctive voice. It’s an incredibly beautiful piece of music that I could easily listen repeatedly for a few days and not get bored. Before you know it, the song is over and you have to press repeat. There are songs like this. They are like a star or a black hole, and you get caught in the gravity well and it’s hard to get away from it. Why would you? The sweetness of destruction or implosion seem to fit the sounds and emotions that well up in me when I hear these songs.

The long “oooh” comes from the end of the question, “Will I folloooooowww?” that is just extended for about 30 seconds. At the same time, a steady synthesizer rhythm takes over of the song, with live drums in the background. Merging rhythms almost implode together with Gibbons’ incredibly beautiful voice.

“I wonder why I don’t know what you see…” says Gibbons that is how Plastic begins. The drum sequence is reminiscent of something out of the Dummy sessions. However Gibbons is interrupted by abrupt and brutal samples. A distinctive slow helicopter like sound is heard rolling around in the background. Synth chaos takes over the end of the track.

We Carry On starts with an alarm like sound. A steady droning is heard as well. The repeating patterns enforce an intense pace. A strange off-tune guitar makes a mid song appearance. Deep Water begins with a banjo. Gibbons sings an almost funny track with robotic voices as backup vocals.

Machine gun features sounds that remind of gunfire. They are in stark contrast with Gibbons’ high voice. The droning sharp sounds reach a crescendo midway through the song. The droning sounds take over the song until the end. A high melodic synth appears at the conclusion. It reminds me of Wendy Carlos and A Clockwork Orange.

Small begins slowly. Gibbons sings with sampled vocal accompaniments (of herself?) which disappear a third of the way through. A clear sounding synth starts a new faster rhythm. As fast as these sounds appear, they disappear once more when all but a third of the song is left. Haunting Gibbons reappears. A moody guitar marks the return of the 70ish organ and signals the end of the song.

An off beat drum beat marks the beginning of Magic Doors. Strings and Gibbons’ clear voice singing in tune are desperately emotional. “I’m losing myself / my desire I can’t hide / No reason in life for…” Magic Doors lead into Threads., the last track of Third. The album ends strong.

If there is one thing that Portishead does excessively well, is that they know exactly when to use an orchestra. Ever since PNYC, it is an great talent to possess to be able to use these incredible instruments along with samples and synths. By far, this will be loved and played by fans, more than any other Portishead record.

Haunting, emotional, moody, raw and modern, Third is an incredible record that will be loved by millions.

The album isn’t as aggressive as was hinted by the band in the end of 2007, but it is certainly aggressive for Portishead. Some of the synth sounds resemble helicopters or machine gun sounds at times. The album ends with the blaring sampled warning sounds of a lighthouse. Just like in the past with other albums of Portishead, this will be a disc that you will listen to over and over again, putting the volume up higher and higher until you can perceive all of the sounds and melodies hidden in their beautiful tracks.

taken from http://range.wordpress.com/2008/03/09/portishead-third-review/

Portishead's new album 'nothing like' predecessors

2008-03-13T21:00:00.000-07:00

Portishead have revealed more about 'Third', their long-awaited new album, describing it as the "older brother" of its predecessors.

Guitarist Adrian Utley has also described the album's sound as a departure in some areas.

He told Billboard: “It sounds nothing like 'Dummy' or 'Portishead', but it’s definitely its older brother or sister. It’s the same mindset we’ve always had, only further down the road.”

He also added that the album features some fast tempos for the band, with some tracks reaching 120bpms.

Despite the 11-year wait between 'Third' and 1997's self-titled effort, Utley claims the future of the band was never in doubt.

He said: “There was never no Portishead. It was just we’d had enough, and we didn’t have any ideas.

“We all got on with various different things, but we worked on each other’s projects. There was always Portishead.”

'Third' is released on April 28.

taken from http://www.nme.com/news/portishead/34644

Portishead Biography

2008-03-13T19:37:00.000-07:00

Portishead Biography (by Stephen Thomas Erlewine)

Portishead may not have invented trip-hop, but they were among the first to popularize it, particularly in America. Taking their cue from the slow, elastic beats that dominated Massive Attack's Blue Lines and adding elements of cool jazz, acid house, and soundtrack music, Portishead created an atmospheric, alluringly dark sound.
The group wasn't as avant-garde as Tricky, nor as tied to dance traditions as Massive Attack; instead, it wrote evocative pseudo-cabaret pop songs that subverted their conventional structures with experimental productions and rhythms of trip-hop. As a result, Portishead appealed to a broad audience — not just electronic dance and alternative rock fans, but thirtysomethings who found techno, trip-hop, and dance as exotic as worldbeat. Before Portishead released their debut album, Dummy, in 1994, trip-hop's broad appeal wasn't apparent, but the record became an unexpected success in Britain, topping most year-end critics polls and earning the prestigious Mercury Music Prize; in America, it also became an underground hit, selling over 150,000 copies before the group toured the U.S. Following the success of Dummy, legions of imitators appeared over the next two years, but Portishead remained quiet as they worked on their second album. Named after the West Coast shipping town where Geoff Barrow grew up, Portishead formed in Bristol, England, in 1991. Prior to the group's formation, Barrow had worked as a tape operator at the Coach House studio, where he met Massive Attack. Through that group, he began working with Tricky, producing the rapper's track for the Sickle Cell charity album. Barrow also wrote songs for Neneh Cherry's Homebrew, though only "Somedays" appeared on the record. Around the time of Portishead's formation, he had begun to earn a reputation as a remix producer, working on tracks by Primal Scream, Paul Weller, Gabrielle, and Depeche Mode. Barrow met Beth Gibbons, who had been singing in pubs, in 1991 on a job scheme. Over the next few years, the pair began writing music, often with jazz guitarist Adrian Utley, who had previously played with both Big John Patton and the Jazz Messengers.

Before releasing a recording, Portishead completed the short film To Kill a Dead Man, an homage to '60s spy movies. Barrow and Gibbons acted in the noirish film and provided the soundtrack, which earned the attention of Go! Records. By the fall, Portishead had signed with Go! and their debut album, Dummy, was released shortly afterward. Dummy was recorded with engineer Dave MacDonald, who played drums and drum machines, and guitarist Utley, who rounded out Portishead's lineup. Both Barrow and Gibbons were media-shy — the vocalist refused to participate in any interviews — which meant that the album received little attention outside of the weekly U.K. music press, which praised the album and its two singles, "Numb" and "Sour Times," heavily. Soon, Go! and Portishead had developed a clever marketing strategy based on the group's atmospheric videos that began to attract attention. Melody Maker, Mixmag, and The Face named Dummy as 1994's album of the year, and early in 1995, "Glory Box" debuted at number 13 without any radio play. Around the same time, "Sour Times" entered regular rotation on MTV in America. Within a few weeks, Dummy and "Sour Times" were alternative rock hits in the U.S. Back in the U.K., the album had crossed over into the mainstream, becoming a fixture in the British Top 40. In July, the record won the Mercury Music Prize for Album of the Year, beating highly touted competition from Blur, Suede, Oasis, and Pulp. Following the Mercury Music Prize award, Barrow retreated to Coach House to begin work on Portishead's second album. The self-titled record finally appeared in September 1997. The live PNYC followed late the next year.

taken from http://alwaysontherun.net/portis.htm

Portishead will release new album titled Third

2008-03-13T19:34:00.000-07:00

Finally after 8 years waiting, Portishead soon will release new album. Portishead stated that the new album, titled Third, had been mixed and was nearly complete, and was due for release in early April 2008. The release date was later pushed back to April 28.

Below the Portishead Third Tracklist :

“Silence” - 4:59
“Hunter” - 3:57
“Nylon Smile” - 3:16
“The Rip” - 4:30
“Plastic” - 3:27
“We Carry On” - 6:27
“Deep Water” - 1:30
“Machine Gun” - 4:43
“Small” - 6:45