James Arden checks out the garage rockers latest album.
The Christian rock band from Brighton bring religion to the masses.
Recipe for modern R'n'B album: liberal helpings of guest rappers and an overdose of sexual euphemisms.
One thing is certain: this album was surrounded by mystique and expectation due to the band’s absence. Many people worried that this new project would merely try to recreate former glories, Portishead and Dummy, making their work too reminiscent and pining for “trip hop” of the 1990s rather than original and worthy of the anticipation. Is Third, however, an example of music still relevant to today’s musical landscape or is it obsolete?
Third has undoubtedly escaped the label of “trip hop”: there is honesty about their sound that makes such a term unworthy. Rather than playing to the grandeur of what was expected of them, they produced something new and utterly bleak and mind-blowing. They have, by the way, succeeded. The album starts with an excerpt from an old Brazilian film loosely translated as “beware the rule of three”: so many interpretations can be made of this and they are all correct.
Every song is muscular and where some end abruptly, others seem to drag on for eternity, aided by Gibbons’ strangled, mesmerising voice. The beats always seem to be spiralling downwards while Gibbons holds that brooding ambience and vulnerability with agonising perfection. Rather than using socio-political themes, the songs are of personal emotions and mental hopelessness. They portray a profound sense of loss, isolation and pathos: in Nylon Smile Gibbons moans that “I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve you and I don’t know what I’ll do without you.”
Muffled percussion; the rumbles and screeches of the keyboard and strings; and the juxtaposition of minimalist, “psychedelic, post-industrial disjointedness” with organic textures, makes this an album to be admired at first before he can be truly cherished. Machine Gun hits you with brutal drumbeats and an edgy electro grittiness while songs like Plastic shows us the determination of a minimal orchestral background. The ukulele-driven Deep Water, however, acts as a perfect change in pace. Silence has an eerie chase-scene urgency to it while Gibbons throughout keeps it desolate and austere. The closest they get to “old-Portishead” is with Threads but to say they are trying to reproduce former work is an insult.
This was certainly worth the wait, and makes you wonder if it will be another 10 years until we experience something like Third from Portishead again.
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