Portishead
Third
Island Records
By Jose Fritz
I was speaking with the infamously untamed and drunken music writer Tom Jönze in my car in the pissing rain at a train station. He was a little wasted and a little car-less and needed a ride. Third came on the stereo and he perked up, suddenly sober and aware. This was a record that excited him. He held up a finger and made bloodshot eye contact. “It’s like the Silver Apples man… You gotta read up on the Silver Apples”
It is true that Tom Jönze is a functional alcoholic, and that he’d drink Lysol if it came down to it; he is also a wildly knowledgeable music geek in his arena. So I listened. And so it came mere hours later that I was browsing the internet, listening to MP3s. I was reading the strange sordid history of a band I wasn’t reviewing, that existed twice, each time only briefly and who didn’t exist anymore.
The parallels were as obvious as Mr. Jönze suggested -- the decade long siesta between releases and the dreary, murky song structures. The Silver Apples lack the ghostly vocals of Beth Gibbons but it’s forgivable. She was only two years old when they first formed.
Geoff Barrow, who had been working with Tricky and Massive Attack, formed Portishead over twenty years ago. Their first release being a soundtrack to a spy noir film; it was a strange beginning for the future leaders of the trip-hop movement, but it was something they carried into the genre they would pioneer. There’s a dramatic, snaking quality to good trip-hop, something it has more in common with film scores than dance music. The year was 1991 and by 1998 they’d be utterly burned out.
It was that special kind of burn out indigenous only to touring Western Europe; where the PA always sucks and the crowds always spits on you and the club owner skips out on payment. It was damn ugly. Geoff was suffering paranoid fits wherein he thought the world would end in eight years and rambling about it in interviews. It was just one more abrasion on the stressed mind of a severe dyslexic. The world tour supporting their second self-titled CD was the end of it. They stopped being Portishead for about a decade.
But the decade wasn’t wasted. Beth took advantage of their hiatus between albums to do a solo album, Out of Season, in 2002. Adrian Utley scored a BBC Television series called The Ship and did a 30 minute free jazz/electronica epic titled Warminster with Mount Vernon Arts Lab. They produced some albums they did a couple remixes, and a couple guest appearances. But Geoff got drunk and hid in Australia. It was 2007 and he was thinking about this album and after that kind of interval; it had become intimidating.
But things came together. The time had done them right. Each had time to rest or write as needed and in the studio they had the advantage of more time since Island Records had the sense not to rush them. Most of the Bristol scene trop-hop artists had fallen apart in a flurry of booze, blunts and bad cocaine cut with powdered lidocaine. Tricky kept putting out records, but they were a pale reiteration of his previous work. Portishead weathered that, not with strength but with distance. It’s probably why they retained their original gothic feel in the music despite all other semblance of change.
The songs breakdown unexpectedly into Jucifer-like dirges and rebound slowly with subdued electronic drum beats. They collapse into minimalist vocal passages and rebound in layers of hip-hop beats. It’s a brilliantly varied record that barely grips the air tightly enough to cohere into a single album. Welcome back.
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