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/
Showing posts with label review. Show all posts
Showing posts with label review. Show all posts
Tuesday
Portishead Review by Michaelangelo Matos
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.
Monday
Portishead Review by Corey DuBrowa
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
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
Friday
Portishead Third Review by Stephen Trousse
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
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
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