So I guess I’m probably way behind on this one, but anyway: My sis informed me at dinner last night that not only has Portishead been working on their third album (and first in ten years), but it’s in the can, it’s called Third, and it officially comes out in only two weeks. The video for the dub number “Machine Gun” (the first single), is just below. Even notwithstanding the “Blue Monday“-ish rat-a-tat that drives the track, I’m loving that subterranean bass lurking under the surface. (Hearing it reminded me of the beginning of this Chemical Brothers video, which I always found more nightmarish than I think they meant it to be.) And then it gets all Kraftwerky right around 2:40, which is a direction that generally sits well with me.
I know Dummy was everybody and their brother’s favorite trip-hop album back in the day, and it kinda lost some cool cachet just by becoming so gimongously popular. (Normally, I wouldn’t hold that against an album, but, Dummy was kinda everywhere there for awhile. Sorta like Air or The Crystal Method a few years later.) Still, along with R.E.M.’s Monster, the Tribe’s Beat, Rhymes, Life, Ill Communication, the now-insufferable, then-inescapable Pulp Fiction soundtrack, and a few others, Dummy was the score of my college years. Both melancholy and beat-intensive, it worked in the background for almost any occasion, and a lot of my fonder memories from school days are keyed to that Bristol sound.
At any rate, it seems the rest of the new tracks are also floating around Youtube: Silence | Hunter | Nylon Smile | The Rip |Plastic | We Carry On | Deep Water | Machine Gun | Small (check out that Syd Barrett bridge) | Magic Doors | Threads. At this early stage, my current favorite (other than the single) is “The Rip,” mainly for that catchy acoustic-to-electronic fade right around the two-minute mark.
Third did come out of nowhere.
The consensus that I gather from the immoral internet kids that have downloaded the leak, is that it’s very good. I’m not anticipating much of that old, mid-90s makeout glue that held Dummy and Mezzanine together.