Portishead
Third

THE REVIEW

Disconcertment. This is the first impression I got when listening to the new, awaited, and almost unexpected work by the Bristol combo. The credit earned with the seminal "Dummy" in 1994, reaffirmed three years later with the self-titled Portishead even though the photocopy effect was more than evident, was immense and still all to be spent.

Transposing into music a black-and-white film in slow motion. This was the image that the listener got from that melting pot of sounds. The genre was dubbed trip-hop or even the Bristol-sound (in homage to the city belonging to the trio), and the imitators who plundered the genre - ultimately degenerating it into anonymous and detached chill-out music, the kind of entertainment music good for sipping a drink in company or for spending a carefree half-hour of happy hour - are countless.

In 2008, it has to be acknowledged that trip-hop had already rendered its bill, and the Portishead understood this by wiping the slate clean of the previous two works and resetting every space-time coordinate. However, if with "Dummy" the surprise effect and novelty were immediate, as well as an acknowledged masterpiece of the genre, among these grooves it is hard to discern the dawn of a new day. The comparison with the two previous works, besides being blasphemous, seems at least nonsensical.

Rhythms have become robotic, cold, dark, and soulless. Beth Gibbons gives the impression of singing with icy detachment over instrumental bases that do not belong to her. She unravels litanies in many cases detached - not unlike John Cage grappling with "Indeterminacy" - from the instrumental part centered on a sort of futuristic kraut-rock filtered through metallic membranes.

The acclaimed Machine Gun with its hammering metallurgical-style base catapults the listener into an alienating electronic barrage, making the celestial voice of Gibbons, truly more comfortable in retro-melancholic tracks, which formed the backbone of the "Out Of Season" album co-signed in 2002 by Rustin Man (alias Paul Webb, former bassist of Talk Talk), seem alien and out of place. The industrial-dark-wave rhythms practically looped in Plastic and We Carry On increase the sensation of suffocating claustrophobia that one derives as the tracks advance. The Rip and Small with their slow, minimalist progression seduce the listener only to bombard them at the end with an instrumental tail that somehow harks back to some late-sixties psychedelia.

Each track seems to mirror the previous without particular emotions, and when the tones calm down as in the case of Deep Water, it's not quite clear whether that track landed there by chance or if Geoff Barrow pulled out of his hat some old fragment of a forgotten pre-war American b-movie. Frankly inexplicable.

Only at the end of the CD, particularly in the last two tracks, Magic Doors and Threads, do the frosty futuristic tones soften to let, at times, faint hints of the past re-emerge.

In all likelihood, this is neither a one-star work, nor by any means a five-star one, and thinking sensibly, we could trace the truth, as often happens, roughly halfway. With the pieces still moving, it's not easy to give a well-considered judgment, and as usual, we will leave the definitive answer on the goodness of the project to time.

Nostalgically and (I admit) with a bit of a lump in my throat, between the serious and the fairytale-like, I can only say "Once upon a time there were the Portishead..."