- Label
- Island
- Release date
- 21st April 2008
- Genre
- Experimental
- Buy this album
- Order CD
Ten years in the making, and it was worth every minute
A full 10 years on from their last album, Portishead produce another masterclass in exotically bruised melancholia. Third is their usual exquisite ache of mesmerising samples, ghost-in-the-machine vocals and film noir melodrama, but the music is edgier, sharper: Nylon Smile and the single Machine Gun sound viciously serrated, as raw as they are effortlessly refined.
Amidst the fractured, percussive beats and sawing strings, Beth Gibbons remains an eerily spectral presence, a living, whispering embodiment of a long, dark night of the soul. Her siren stirrings are sublime on the Theremin-flecked The Rip and even enchant on the album's sole departure, the bizarre Deep Water, which finds her crooning over a George Formby-esque ukelele. A decade may have passed but this is beatific Portishead business as usual, a fact that is neatly summarised by the title of the brutal-yet-beautiful lament We Carry On. This music is them; it is what they do.
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