Portishead

PORTISHEAD
Third
**** 1/2
Lo fi trip hop contradiction
Not content with reinventing the wheel on their stunning and game-changing previous albums, the trip hop visionaries have undertaken an even headier task: reinventing themselves. Mostly gone are the trademark noir lounge dirges and spy film guitars over stuttering snare beats. This is a much messier affair. Improvised percussion runs explode into songs at random intervals. Buzz saw guitar lines slice chunks out of any sense of forward movement, knocking the listener off balance. There's even a folky, Depression-era ukulele number called "Deep Water." Other songs end abruptly, and without warning. It amounts to an extraordinarily unsettling effect, which with Portishead has long been the point. But there's a coat of dirt and fuzz in the kitchen sink bric a brac that sullies the hyper-stylized "Portishead" vibe here. "Plastic" for example, takes its propulsion from the bend of a vibrating sheet of metal. Of course, it's all still held together, or torn apart, by the power of Beth Gibbons' vocals. She's the woman for whom the clichés haunting and ethereal were invented. Listening to Portishead has always been like floating through a waking dream. But now the sleek edges have atrophied into a dusty chaos, and it's all the more beautiful and perfect for the change. (Island Records; www.islandrecords.com)

ROCKS LIKE:
Solex's Low Kick and Hard Bop
Silver Apples' self-titled
John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13

Interview with Adrian Utley of Portishead

This record seems like quite a departure from your previous work.
It's a departure from the sound of Dummy, but not the road we're on. When we finished Dummy we thought it sounded pretty weird. Think about "Wandering Star" and how it starts, that was a pretty weird sounding thing. It's now assimilated into the general music mainstream if you like, because it was a successful record. It's language is not as weird as it used to be. We've always made records that sound a bit weird really. It's not such a departure in spirit, although sonically it's different, because it had to be. We have to move forward.

Would you agree this is overall a less polished record?
It's not so in tune. You could say out of tune, but I think it's more in tune by it's out of tune-ness. It's like old blues guitar players, their guitars are not in tune in the conventional sense, but within its context it's so in tune when it's out of tune. I'm not being pretentious!

Is there some intangible quality to a song that lets you know when you're finished?
Because we have a generally minimal approach, without massive layers of sound, it's about using the few things you need to use to say the thing you need to say. I guess you just know when it's done. We always know how to edit ourselves. Sometimes you can kill a good idea by loading it with too much stuff and you can lose its impetus or your love for it, and then you go off it.

Is it hard work emotionally performing these songs?
Being in Portishead and writing music is a frustrating, difficult process. It's not a joyous journey, ever. It's a difficult world to want to go back into. It's hard work because of the deconstructive nature of our writing process. We'll make stuff then destroy it. To be minimal and succinct, it means we have to take everything to pieces that we've just done. To deconstruct and find a more potent way of saying the same thing. When we add anything to it we take so much time discussing what that thing will be before we even do it. It's not often a visceral kind of experience. A lot of bands write music on piano or acoustic guitar and get together and play it in the studio, and have that experience of playing music together. Ours is never like that. It's always put together in tiny bits by us playing the instruments. It's a joyless experience, but it's cathartic.

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