The Top 30 Albums of 2008: # 2

Portishead
Third

If Third were a film, it would open with a chase scene.  The first shot would be incongruous—a bunch of people sitting in a comedy club.  As the emcee announces the next comedian, the drummer of the jazz quartet on stage with him plays a loose roll.  The audience applauds, smiling.  Cut to a cobblestone street.  The camera moves along the individual stones until it catches up with a pair of women’s legs, running.  Fast.  She ducks into an alleyway.  Cut back to the comedy club, the comedian makes an entrance, points at someone in the audience, raises his drink.  Cut back to the girl, frantically searching for a door in the alleyway—something that might take her into the back room of a shop.  She looks back fearfully over her shoulder, before running further down the alley.  One of her shoes flies off, but she doesn’t have time to stop and grab it.  She’s sure her unknown assailant is close behind, so she takes off her other shoe and continues to run.  She reaches a large red door on a brick wall, tries it, and it opens.  She hears laughter, lots of people.  She charges in through the door and finds herself backstage at the comedy club.  She can hear the crowd and the comedian, but can’t see them because there’s a maze of curtains between her and the stage.  It’s dark.  She starts fighting her way through the curtains.  Suddenly, she feels another presence behind her.  She struggles to get though the curtains.  Finally, she breaks through to the other side.  She finds herself in a vacant auditorium that hasn’t been used in years.  On the stage is a television playing a comedy special—the one from the first shot.  She stands, stunned.  A hand gently wraps itself around her throat. 

In an interview with Pitchfork earlier this year, Geoff Barrow laid bare the mission statement for Portishead’s third album, 11 years in the making: “We really wanted to sound like ourselves but not sound like ourselves. It was always going to be difficult.”  In all reality, Portishead could have dropped an album in the mold of their towering mid-90’s achievements, 1994’s Dummy and 1997’s Portishead—two albums that form a master class in trip-hop, fusing hip-hop sampling techniques with jazz-inspired torch songs and an aesthetic tuned toward film scores, a sort of visual ear—and been welcomed back after their 11 year absence with fervent excitement.  They chose a much harder road: Rebuilding themselves from the ground up.  Fortunately, the three members of Portishead have a very clear understanding of what “like ourselves” sounds like.  The band got its first record contract after making and soundtracking a short espionage film, To Kill a Dead Man.  In order to make Third, Barrow, Adrian Utley, and Beth Gibbons simply re-imagined themselves as the same artists who made that original film—generating an album full of moody atmospherics.  Another espionage film, without the film.  A series of chase scenes.  A psychological thriller. 

Third opens with “Silence” an elusive song that seems to travel at four different speeds at once.  The churning rhythm never quite syncs up with the ominous melody, and stray beeps and squeals fly about all over the place.  It’s an unsettling, elusive beginning to an unsettling, elusive album.  “The Rip” features Beth Gibbons singing over a delicate guitar riff, with an atmospheric fuzz barely permeating the background.  Slowly, the background begins to overtake the foreground, and the guitar is overtaken by a wave of Brian Eno-referencing electronics that replicate the finger-plucked notes at a louder volume with an otherworldly resonance.  It’s a simple trick, an easy bait-and-switch of a song made effective by Gibbons, whose voice anchors the song.  Much has been made of Beth Gibbons’ voice—critics compare her to Billie Holiday as frequently as they use the phrase “guitar pyrotechnics.”  On Third, Barrow and Utley utilize Gibbons’ voice as the anchor for each song—the unwavering constant under which they can experiment.  On “Plastic,” they augment her with what could be an abstraction of an industrial ceiling fan.  “Machine Gun” is an unrelenting shoot-out between two drum machines, with Gibbons as the negotiator running between them.

Third continues to make 11 proposals for what Portishead’s sound could be—they range from the ukulele-led “Deep Water,” which could have been an homage to Bernadette Peters in The Jerk backed by a couple of doowoppers singing in their sleep, to “Magic Doors,” which begins with an emergency alert signal and ends with a cowbell led free-jazz horn freakout to rival Radiohead’s “The National Anthem.”  On Third’s final song, “Threads,” Beth Gibbons sings, “I’m worn out/Tired of my mind.”  It’s no wonder.  Portishead spends an entire album inventing themselves, scrapping the idea, then reinventing themselves.  When Geoff Barrow said he wanted the band “to sound like ourselves but not sound like ourselves,” he didn’t say “with each individual song.”  Yet, that’s exactly what they do.  In the end, they prove that, in order to reinvent yourself, you first have to know exactly who you are.

-Martin Brown, 2008

Comments

[Marty]

Now's a good time to make your bets on #1, if you've got 'em.

[Sean Witzke]

Microcastle is my first guess. Although I remember Marty wasn't feeling the post-Fluorescent Grey stuff. Maybe Hercules and Love Affair, then?

I completely blanked on that Barrow quote, and it's great to see that as a mission statement for the album. You nailed what I love about this record.

[Kenny]

Jason Mraz, if only because Tucker got in trouble twice on this blog in the past few weeks! LOL

Honestly, though, I was betting on Third being your number 1. For me, it's easily the best album of the year, so I can't think of anything better. Hmmm....

I'm going to guess...I dunno, the new Brian Wilson album? I loved that one, but I'm also a *huge* Brian Wilson fan.

I dunno! I want to cheat and look at the Rolling Stone list and find an album I never heard!

Rhymest & Mark Ronson's Michael Jackson tribute! That has to be it!

[Kenny]

The Rhymefest mixtape isn't from Rolling Stone, it's an album I loved this past year.

[Marty]

It's true I've probably done more Deerhunter-bashing this year than anything else, but I am gearing up to give Microcastle a fair shot... now that the countdown's over.

I'll give you guys a hint: It's an album that we haven't mentioned very much around these parts. But when Tucker and I walked into the War Room, it was the first time we'd ever agreed on what number one should be.

Oh, and gentlemen, I'm planning on sending out mp3 mixes on Monday (with all this writing I had to put them on hold until the end of the countdown) so look for them sometime this week!

[Tucker Stone]

Is it the first time? I thought we were pretty much in agreement when we did 83. I know we changed it late in the game, during the six month countdown.

Nothing could have been as problematic as last years, that shit took 2 hours of fighting.

Oh, and since the 1 is up, here's some stuff on the mentions:
I'm growing more affectionate towards Deerhunter, but that shit never had a chance for me. I have a hard time with the sort of tossed-off quality of music put out by people who are talented, but seem to coast on it--I think I probably appreciate the level of skill that the band has more than Marty might, but either way: they're going to have to put in more time working out the kinks from a practice/production standpoint. Some artists are certainly interesting when they release their vaguely underperformed type tunes, but Microcastle was just too half-baked for me. That's probably unfair, but I'm not going to push for something that I spend half of the time listening to wishing they'd have taken more time with. Some people can pull it off--Scott Walker's bizarre EP from earlier this year was a total toss-off, and it's still fascinating, Ryan Adams has done some interesting fly-by-minute work, but Deerhunter isn't one of them. Maybe next time, and I still haven't heard that follow-up ep to Microcastle.

Hercules and Love Affair--I thought that was a great, great listen, and I'm certainly not done with it, but it never got me going on a deeper level. If anything, it could share the spot with something like Kelley Polar. But I'd push for anything in the top ten as having been a stronger album.

Rhymefest/Mark Ronson:
I missed this one. Too much time trying to figure out the lyrics of Certainty of Swarms, I guess.

Oh, and the Bon Iver and Ghostface didn't make it based on release dates, I know Sean liked them a lot.