Portishead

Syncopated beats slam in a one-dimensional atmosphere, interrupted by deeper, more mechanical seizures, and the words, “I saw a savior / A savior come my way / I thought I’d see him / In the cold light of day.” Voices join in the background, building up throughout the song, sounding soft against the piston-pump that composes the spine of the track. Suddenly, the voices are gone. The beats duplicate themselves and pour in and out of one another, vibrating more eerily as extraterrestrial organs come alive, wheezing over the surge of it all. This is “Machine Gun,” the first single from Portishead’s new album, “Third.”

More than 10 years after their eponymous second album, the prospect of a third Portishead studio release seemed something less than viable. After all, trip-hop was a movement firmly entrenched in the 90s, petering out with Massive Attack’s “Mezzanine” in 1998. Without a cultural groundswell like that of the original Bristol scene to inspire a new direction for the sound, Portishead seemed destined to gather dust alongside the decade’s other forgotten greats. Which wouldn’t be so bad—the group’s debut, 1994’s “Dummy,” is one of the most lauded albums of the genre, not to mention the decade. Heavy with lush, sexual bass lines and cinematic string arrangements, “Dummy” brought a sultry sort of half-humanity to the genre. While any vocals on Massive Attack’s debut, “Blue Lines,” were samples—and alienating ones at that—Beth Gibbons’ siren vocal work on Portishead’s “Sour Times” and “It Could Be Sweet” was disarmingly beautiful, sinister in its power to alternately engage and enslave the listener. When the group announced their long awaited follow-up to 1997’s “Portishead” late last year, they already had a serious reputation to live up to.

So how did Gibbons, Geoff Barrow, and Adrian Utley try to return to the heights they reached in 1994? By annihilating them and starting all over again. Fans of the group will be listening intently for any trace of “Dummy” on “Third,” but other than Gibbons’ pipes, the two albums share very little in common. While “Dummy” was an electronic beast in pop-music clothing, “Third” is a sterile, deconstructed affair that doesn’t deceive or distract from what it is for an instant. And while nothing can quite compare to the beautiful lie that Gibbons told on “Sour Times” (“Nobody loves me, it’s true / Not like you”), “Third” manages to succeed in an entirely new, albeit startling way.

With a new attitude comes a new aesthetic, and it’s remarkable to hear how the band has matured since trip-hop’s heyday. While that music ultimately strove to bring a sort of hypnotic order to a combination of sampled and original material, here the band seems to revel in imperfection. The best example of this kind of self-conscious disruption is the first track, “Silence,” where a bizarre Portuguese radio monologue gives way to a primal drum line. Its time signature is only complicated by intermittent vocals, bass, and strings, sliding in and out of the song in a frustrating but fascinating pattern. Then, just as it all starts to build toward a frenzy, the song cuts out—one of several calculated mistakes that pulls the listener deeper into the weird chaos. “Nylon Smile” wallows in its own near-insanity, with Gibbons wailing, “I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve you” over distorted guitar plucking and backward percussion that make the listener wonder whether those words convey love or just paralyzing fear.

“We Carry On,” the most manic of the 11 tracks, begins frantically, with factory beats and soundboard wails that carry the song forward into a hypnotic blur, before Utley erases it all with a decayed guitar riff that revives the last minute. This gives way to the album’s single anomaly—the totally out of place ukulele tune “Deep Water,” whose relatively breathable atmosphere serves as a pleasant diversion from the claustrophobic intensity of “Machine Gun” and what follows.

“Small” is the album’s masterpiece, a churning, transforming behemoth consisting of Gibbons’ vocals over a droning bass note and pieces of organ-driven jazz-guitar freak-outs filled with happy injections of feedback and tonal non-sequiturs. At almost seven minutes, it rewards the time it requires. The smoldering, near-space-rock “Threads” lets the album fall away, packed with chunky percussion and rousing, indignant, Björk-like howls from Gibbons. She seems to reach out for any last shred of reality. What she gets is a minute-long, foghorn-like blare that all but pushes the listener off the edge with her.

It has taken them a decade, but Portishead have reinvented themselves so successfully that they barely identify with their past. For diehards, the new maturity may result in something like empty nest syndrome. What Portishead is now interested in is visceral, confrontational, alarming, and totally brilliant music.

—Staff writer Ryan J. Meehan can be reached at meehan@fas.harvard.edu.