The Fix

Above all, Portishead are about context. Call it ambiance, or texture, or concept: regardless of the term you use, at their root they are a band who exist as a framework and can call a framework forth. The symbiosis between these two seeming opposites is at the very heart of their sound and appeal, for theirs is music that envelops you as you envelop it, that creates what you were feeling and feels when and what you are creating. This has always been true of Portishead, even when they were producing curious pop morsels like “Sour Times,” or when their eponymous second album was the soundtrack for every chill-out and make-out party of 1998. They’re undeniably heavy, even if they haven’t always been remembered as such.

I say all of this as a preface to Third, which seems to have been treated thus far as a betrayal to fans that have been waiting a decade for new material from the UK trip-hop trio. It’s true enough, in a way: Third is their least amenable album to date, and their least friendly. The eerie melancholy that has always been a kernel of their sound has grown up into full-blown fright and panic, the shy sexuality abandoned for something muscular, aggressive, even psychotic. Put another way, you will not be chillin’ nor hookin’ up to Third. In fact, Third requires and brings into being a particularly poignant brand of solitude.

Yet despite the work it requires, Third is far and away Portishead’s most accomplished, mature, and gratifying album, its marriage between dystopia and fragile hope so thoroughly of this moment that I almost can’t imagine listening to anything else these days. “Machine Gun” mixes incessant thrusts of violence–synthesizers that march, well, like machine guns–with Beth Gibbons’ inimitable wounded vocals, which are no match for the cacophony that surrounds them yet still somehow manage to survive through the war. The odd howling of “Small,” the alien pleading of “Threads”: these songs are sculptures, rendered from the problems of modern humanity and pulling you, forcefully, into existential contemplation. Sour times, indeed.