Portishead: Third

Portishead has only made three albums in 14

years—and what right-thinking person would have wanted more If they'd

pumped out a new disc every other year, no matter how good, they'd have turned

into Morcheeba—a moody relic, forever stuck in a moment when breakbeats

and bad vibes for boom times hadn't become the sound of abject nostalgia.

Instead, Portishead has become a minor legend by keeping silent. Though Beth

Gibbons has recorded with Rustin Man in the meantime, Portishead's producers,

Geoff Barrow and Adrian Utley, have only loomed larger in their absence,

allowing the trio to slip the dated trip-hop tag. The triumph of Third is that it sounds exactly

like Portishead and nothing like trip-hop. This is the late-night, beat-driven,

torpid-languid music of a zillion coffee shops, sure, but with the blood drained

out of it, a creepy-crawly, black-and-white-sounding thing that gets under the

skin and stays there from the first play. On tracks like "The Rip" (whose

rubber-band keyboards and tick-tocking drums are reminiscent of mid-period

Stereolab) and the smoky-hazy "Nylon Smile," Gibbons sounds more hollowed-out

and harrowed than ever, a human nervous twitch on too much coffee and too

little sleep. And whether it's the muscular steel-sheet guitars of "We Carry

On," the frayed electronic drums and keyboard stabs of "Machine Gun," or the

psychedelic spaghetti-Western soundtrack of "Silence," Barrow and Utley provide

deep spaces for Gibbons' raw emotions to sink into, and nearly every track

provides some little sonic goodie midway through as a reward for continued

attention after all these years. For once, it's worth the effort.