PortisheadThird | Island April 22,
2008 5:00:06 PM
|
David Lynch took back his spooky, crackly beats and the band replaced them with a pile of electronics and rickety, minimalist percussion to craft this ultra-depressing ode to watching it all slip away. Listening to the long-awaited curveball that is Third is like watching rotten harbor debris, scavenger sea gulls, and massive tankers float by. “Nylon Smile” melds a repetitive hand drum with backwards guitar warbles as a bed for Beth Gibbons to deliver a helpless goodbye: “I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve you/And I don’t know what I’ll do without you.” It’s an empty, bewildered feeling that pervades the entire album. “The Rip” follows, twisting a wilting guitar into a chorus of soul-crushing synth tones oozing up from the buried scores of John Carpenter films. They’d sound like an ’80s after-school special if it weren’t for the drugged one-two beat and Gibbons’s near-death whispers. Anyone expecting a return to the slick cinemafunk of ’90s Portishead will be taken aback by Third, but though the album never reaches the eureka moments of old, it’s a welcome step into new territory and a more than satisfying downer dose to set against the onset of sunny days and ice cream.
|
|
|
- Why Dan Grabauskas might actually fix the T — if he can keep his job
- The debate-defining posts of Rhode Island activists wield influence beyond their readership
- Reconciling the irreconcilable
- Boston Lyric Opera’s Seraglio, BU’s Barbiere di Siviglia, Andy Vores’s No Exit, the BPO’s Bartók and Brahms
- Keep your hands on the pole and not on your neighbor’s ass, bucko.
- Never mind its tough-girl alt-porn feminism: SuicideGirls has already moved on to a new generation
- Daniel McCusker’s ‘tHisTHat’
- The potent poetry of Sweet Disaster
- 50 years after the Boston Braves' departure, it’s worth asking: did the wrong team leave town?
- In the real world, funding is only an issue; politics is the most persistent problem
- You, too, can learn to tap into people's unconscious through hypnosis
- The democratic race is getting messy, which can only mean one thing: it’s time to recruit Al Gore
|
-
Matt Parish of Ho-Ag: “Five favorite records I got at my grandparents’ house in West Virginia this year”
|
- Sly-Chi carve out Space on the dance floor
- Pterodactyl Takes Tokyo | Fly Casual
- Sub Pop
- Plus, Stink; Hootenanny; Let It Be (Deluxe Editions) | Rhino/Rykodisc
- Hot Like Wow | Tiger Trax
- Attack | Quarterstick/Touch and Go
- Mountain Battles | 4AD
- The GFAC series returns to its roots with Volume 7
- Giving Up the Ghost | 429
- Diary of an Afro Warrior | Tempa
|
|
|
|