Portishead
Third
(Island, 2008)

A decade is a long time in the music world. Ten years is enough time for thousands of trends, genres, hits, and bands to come and go. It is practically unheard of, maybe because of the pressure to stay current, for any band to take a 10-year hiatus and come back with anything more than a reunion tour or a few new bonus tracks for their box set.

But UK natives Portishead aren’t the type of musical outfit to be intimidated by the whims of the industry. As solo artists and industry workers themselves, Beth Gibbons, Geoff Barrow, and Adrian Utley feel right at home in this moment of occupational terror and fluctuation, and they reflect the eeriness of working in a faceless music industry on the 11 tracks of their first studio album in more than a decade, Third.

The different elements on the album seem to work with and against each other to create a dystopian mixture of biology and mechanics. The drums on album opener “Silence” are the speeding pulses of panicking escapees while the percussion on “Plastic” sounds like the blades of the pursuing helicopter chopping through a dark sky. Instruments become all kinds of apocalyptic symbols, with guitars resembling clanging air raid sirens on “We Carry On”, beat tracks passing for rival artillery fire on “Machine Gun”, and nearly arrhythmic cowbells on “Magic Doors” conjuring tin cups being tapped on the bars of damp and desolate jail cells. Those mournful taps, along with the fuzzy robotic feedback of “Threads”, bring Third to an end without a conclusion.

Gibbons’ vocals are moans and whimpers that come from a distance, echoing up from the bottom of a well or being transmitted through crackling megaphones across huge fields from overhead. She sings of weariness and malaise and lack of identity with repeated lines like “Threads”’s echoed cannonade of “I’m always so unsure,”and “Silence”’s vacant and woeful refrain “Empty in our hearts / Crying out in silence / Wandered out of reach / Too far to speak / Drifting unable.”

The only real shred of humanity in sight—a strange, quiet flicker of hope called “Deep Water”—is a mandolin-strummed, Americana-inspired, 1:35 break from the bleakness stationed at the late-middle of the album. Gibbons warbles “Try not to struggle this time / For I will weather the storm” as male voices echo her refrains using the only warm vocals and harmonies that any of the 11 tracks offers.

With Third, Portishead are abandoning any remaining shred of pop sensibility. They are unapologetically abstract and purposefully creepy. It is meant to be artistic, and it is, but almost defiantly so. They seem to be saying that the only way to make music interesting is to make it abrasive; that they have evolved beyond making music that people can listen to, and they are proud of it.

Listen: Various Tracks [at myspace.com]

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