When it boils down to it there are just three album release stratagems available to today's artists:

1) Devise a unique and rapid methodology for distribution; eliminate lead time between mastering and listening, and, where possible, remove all consumer-associated costs.

2) Wait upwards of five years since your previous album.

and

3) Include the word 'head' in your band name.

Ticking all three check boxes are Radiohead, ticking just two are Portishead. The anticipation for the former, as a result of strategy 2, grew proportionally with the intervening years. For the latter, expectation all but vanished. For Portishead, operations are creative, not personality driven: no-one would be intrigued to know how many times Geoff Barrow hiccuped in any week, nor, unlike with Thom Yorke, would there be an overwrought arty webcast just to tell you (using semaphore). That level of integrity is fundamental to the outlook of Portishead both old and new.

Year 11BW (Before Winehouse) and the Cinerama torch-song blues and beats of Portishead were the toast of the champagne and crudités set: as much as Portishead's sound owed a huge celluloid debt there was a period when breakthrough album Dummy had its offspring orphaned to screens both big and small with alarming Moby-esque ubiquity. To some this popularity apex would have been a lifetime's worth of ambitions fulfilled. To Geoff Barrow, Portishead mainman, it was the antithesis. Creatively barren, he chose the most sensible career option: stop.

Whilst the other Portishead mainstays Beth Gibbons and Adrian Utley busied themselves with solo albums and side-projects, Barrow had a harder time transitioning. Aside from the tangled matter of divorce, Portishead's fertile mind ran aground when he fell out of love with music. In Geoff Barrow's case it seems life, as Michael Stipe would have it, is bigger than you or me.

After a few aborted revival attempts, it was only unearthing the bewitching darkness in the likes of Om and Sunn O))) (both hand-picked in last year's Portishead-curated ATP festival) that gave the band much-needed vitality and an angle to rediscover themselves and reboot their creativity. During those empty times Barrow felt stifled, admitting recently, "It just didn't feel right. It didn't feel like we were breaking any new ground." There was a nagging lack of fulfillment of self, and after a ten year wait, in Third, Portishead might, finally, have their remedy.  

Opener Silence, which is anything but, underlines the seismic shift in collective mindset: the sustained percussive pursuit and frantic paranoid strings offer a persistent creeping threat, like Bitches Brew being chased for its life down claustrophic corridors. It confounds all expectations and delivers a stark treatment loaded with anxiety and fear. Silence may be fraught and unhinged but it buzzes with a dramatic intrigue and intensity all too scarce in music today. Portishead clearly aren't offering concessions or tinkering with the familiar, it's the perfect early warning: to survive they had to adapt, on their terms only.
 
That reidentification with a love of music is soaked to Third's clammy skin; there's an economic precision at work that makes for a starker, bleaker and yet more hypnotic whole. Rhythmically it's archaic and streamlined, similar to RZA's stealthy beat assaults; atmospherically the cinematic spaghetti western vistas and John Barry-isms are ditched for barren urgent proto-electro you'd find from films like Terminator and Escape From New York. Most explicitly, though, is the influence of the aforementioned Om and Sunn O))); Third weaves similar brackish shadows through its fabric,  enshrouding every fibre with a striking supernatural unease (Hunter). The playing too is a similar unmoored enigma; guitarist Adrian Utley regularly achieves Johnny Greenwood-schziophrenia, gliding from fluidity to delivering fitful teutonic fissures. It wouldn't sound out of place amongst latter period Scott Walker and increases the pervading sense of panic and suffocation: the Mysterons getting sinisterly mysterious.

Of all the comparisons for contemporary Portishead, Radiohead are the most obvious - there's a similar loose cohesion evident in the likes of Yorke and co's Optimistic and Weird Fishes as there is on Third's Hunter and Nylon Smile - both bands are stifled by, and celebrated for, their eager and restless minds. Third shares the same aqueous sound throughout, flirting with soaring rushes and flows, cryptic eddies, graceful acoustic swells and amplified tense riptides.

Then, just as the growing sonic agorophobia has you reaching to speed-dial the police (the line's dead, naturally), the mood is lightened. Deep Water is the cosy twilight lullaby you'd expect from the Ink Spots were they fronted by Karen Dalton, it's that comforting and protective sway and reassurance that staves off the bleak foreboding that preceeds it. Everything is going to be alright; trouble's out there but you're tucked up safe, nestled neatly in Portishead's protective bosom. But, despite this soothing succour, you should always beware the friendly stranger. Why? Have you heard Machine Gun?

If, as a former Belleville resident once opined, Hell is chrome, then current single, Machine Gun is its spellbinding soundtrack, and the most marked shift away from the Portishead's smokey nightclub incarnation. It's ferocious and uncompromising: an exhilarating semi-automatic assault of outmoded percussion. Offering a faint flicker of humanity, hope and salvation amidst the blitz is Beth Gibbons. Throughout Third, Gibbons' wounded resilience and folk purity is constantly striking, and on Machine Gun she offers herself no penitance for her self-administered sins: "I just saw a saviour, a saviour come my way / I just thought I'd see it in the cold light of day / But now I realised that I'm only for me, if only I could see / I'd turn myself to me / And recognise the poison in my heart". There is no hope, and as desolate and desperate as that sounds, it's astonishingly effective and affecting.

The Rip too is a key watermark in Portishead's rebirth. As simple and as touching a start couldn't be wished for as, amidst the gentle burr of chordal keyboards, a nylon acoustic gets picked, as do your heartstrings when listening to Beth Gibbons ache out her love-wounded pride ("And in my thoughts I have bled/For the riddles I've been fed"). But then.... but then there's that transformation. Blinking LED pulses take flight and a motorik proficiency emerges as though Harmonia have stumbled in on the recording and want to shake a reason for living back into Gibbons. Set alongside Third's moments of apprenhension, it's a steady release from the tension; an accelerated ascent toward a personal celestial epiphany and a mesmerising transformation from stately bucolic grace to sleek triumph.  
 
Third is exacting in both its poise and purpose. It succeeds not only in becoming Geoff Barrow's personal vendetta against his past - desecrating Portishead history, and all the expectations that go with it - but in the creation of something maddening, entrancing and occassionally terrifying. A fresh spectre has now been sprung and Third reeks of the cold sweat and fear rapt in it - emotions no doubt experirenced by the band in its lengthy gestation. For once, though, it's worth it. That clammy persipiration has been resolved leaving nothing but a mercurial alchemy of darkness and dramatic dementia.

Release date: 28/04/08
Artist website: www.portishead.co.uk
Label: Universal

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