Portishead - Third

I dig it, heavy, updated, utilitarian, with just enough of their old sound to please people that can't move on and enough grit and grimness for simple folk to dismiss it as depressing.

Yeah, I'm well into this album. The Rip is a gorgeous tune, dunno whether to feel happy or sad when I listen to it, amazing!

eh, it's ok, but i'm not floored. when you wait like 10 years between albums, it's my belief that you gotta come a little stronger than this. especially when millions of people have appropriated and commodified your style heavily since then.

it's not bad, but it's not the perfection i'm used to hearing from them. nice to hear beth's voice again though.

as yes, here it is. i harldy ever come to this sub-forum. all apologies for the thread in gen. ban. anyhoo, great album, will be picking this up on release day ^_^

Are you some kind of N00B? There's a perfectly good thread for this in general banter.

JEEESUS

  Obelisong said:

Are you some kind of N00B? There's a perfectly good thread for this in general banter.

 

 

JEEESUS

LOL! i wasn't expecting that when i came back in here :teeth:

lol @obelisong!

The only way i'll listen to this is if my wife buys it... she's a portishead fan... i stated earlier that i lost interest in them about 9 years ago... they can't release an album after 10 years and expect me to come running back... FUCK THAT!

i downloaded this a week ago and was stumbling over the file every day since. just too afraid to put it on - portishead's been really big in my life and the new live youtube clips from ATP did't really do it for me. but last night a friend commented on it and he said it's good!

so now i finally put it on. IT'S GOOD!!!! PORTISHEAD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

!

Upon the first couple of listens it's definitely different and i'm missing the vocal treatments but it's still a notch above everybody else attempting this style of music still..

Third Limited edition box set ready to pre order

http://www.portisheadshop.co.uk/store/page...id=2&col=30

  Weakling said:

after quite a few listens, i'm liking this a lot

missing the vocal treatments and scratches and shit, but we get krautrock instead! yay!

i wouldn't really join the dots between portishead's last studio album and this, because some of this is *very* reminescent of some of the beth solo album with rustin man aka guy from talk talk. if you factor that in this album makes a lot of sense.

and the krautrock neu/can/cluster style beats are very nice! united states of america or silver applesish as well i guess. i like the way there's pretty much untreated oscillators and nice primitive drum and analogue synthy things all over the place, almost like a charty broadcast, lol.

i like nylon smile and machine gun the most i guess

and that brutally gated jazz paradiddle in 'plastic', oooh :angry:

damn.. you got me interested

the more i listen to this album, the more it just makes me passive aggressively angry at the band. i was under the impression that adrian utley (or whatever his name is) was a crazy, obsessive perfectionist. like, to the point that they had an entire 2nd album in the can that he completely scrapped and started over from scratch before finally releasing the self titled album. i'm not, however, hearing any of that on this record. i keep desperately searching for some depth to the music and it simply is not there. sonicly, its incredibly flat and conceptually it just meanders around the land of mediocrity with no sense of direction or purpose. this album honestly sounds like it was thrown together over a long weekend. it sounds more like cat power trying to be edgy than it sounds like the return of portishead. i don't have any preconceived notions of what their music should sound like these days, but a 10 year hiatus is a really long time to develop a new and interesting sound...apparently nobody in the band spent any of that time even thinking about the future of portishead.

unless you're really easily impressed or desperate for something new to listen to, i'd recommend skipping this one.

lol

portishead don't owe you anything (and i'm not even really a fan, i listened to this on the back of being a talk talk/BG & rustin man fan). i like this album. it's more about mood then content in some ways, and as a fan of krautrocky can/neu stuff and broadcast it scratches the right itches, i guess.

but stop going on like they owe you a cultural masterpiece, jesus wept.

  kaini said:

lol

 

 

portishead don't owe you anything (and i'm not even really a fan, i listened to this on the back of being a talk talk/BG & rustin man fan). i like this album. it's more about mood then content in some ways, and as a fan of krautrocky can/neu stuff and broadcast it scratches the right itches, i guess.

 

but stop going on like they owe you a cultural masterpiece, jesus wept.

i don't think they owe me anything except a good album, if they expect me to pay money for it. they didn't deliver that, so they wont be getting my money. simple as that. if i want to hear music like this all i have to do is stand inside a starbucks long enough and i'll get my fix. why would i want to pay for something mediocre that sounds like 50 other artists? i don't ask for much, just that people try a little. i know they've been "working" on this album for at least 2 or 3 years and i just can't hear where all that time and effort went. not to sound cocky, but put me and beth gibbons in a studio and i could produce a better, more original and more creative album than this in a week. give me 2 or 3 years and i'm confident i could produce a fucking masterpiece. if that's not what they were striving for, they shouldn't be going through the motions. every artist should strive to create masterpieces. as it is, it sounds like a few people that probably aren't particularly fond of each other forced themselves to churn something out so they'd have enough money to sit around and do nothing for another 10 years. as an artist, if this was the end product of 2 years of my labor, i would not be proud of it.

i understand why people like it, as i said earlier, it's not awful. but for me, with such a wealth of music available out there, there's absolutely nothing that sets this album apart from the pack. it may fill a certain void in your musical taste - as you said, you enjoy the original music this album is borrowing from, as do i - but i could never recommend an album like this when there are TONS of struggling musicians out there putting much more heart and soul into their music and getting no attention in return. i don't think we should support artists that half-ass music and exploit their fans. thus, i feel the need to point out for others who might feel the same way.

anyone found a non-transcode rip of this yet?

  catsonearth said:

... i keep desperately searching for some depth to the music and it simply is not there. sonicly, its incredibly flat and conceptually it just meanders around the land of mediocrity with no sense of direction or purpose. this album honestly sounds like it was thrown together over a long weekend...

If that is your conclusion then they succeeded in what they wanted to achieve with this album. I read an interview with them and they wanted to break away from the typical Portishead sound. In fact this time they had another complete album before "Third", which they threw away because it sounded too much like previous stuff. This time they were looking for a more raw energy and a not overproduced sound.

  Weakling said:

  catsonearth said:

... i keep desperately searching for some depth to the music and it simply is not there. sonicly, its incredibly flat and conceptually it just meanders around the land of mediocrity with no sense of direction or purpose. this album honestly sounds like it was thrown together over a long weekend...

If that is your conclusion then they succeeded in what they wanted to achieve with this album. I read an interview with them and they wanted to break away from the typical Portishead sound. In fact this time they had another complete album before "Third", which they threw away because it sounded too much like previous stuff. This time they were looking for a more raw energy and a not overproduced sound.

in that case i'll just say that in my opinion, their songwriting on this record isn't strong enough to carry their new, stripped down sound.

i quite liked that.. and the album too

whats that transcode thing anyway?

  tidbit said:

whats that transcode thing anyway?

you might be too old and cynical to be up to date about such "internet" and "mp3" terms, but it means that the files have been re-encoded from an already lossy format, eg. 128kbps transcoded to 320kbps, which is not a good thing.