Portishead - Third

With their first album of new material in 11 years, Portishead have delivered just the record that critics like myself have wanted to hear them make - a smoky, clattering work that skims the border of absolute ugliness and despair without ever really collapsing into complete disrepair.

What their fans are going to make of it - those people still looking for the perfect sequel to their breakout single “Sour Times” - remains to be seen, but for those of us who get to write about what makes music so good or so bad, this record is the perfect encapsulation of all the band’s influences and moody neuroses.

It’s a shame that this band got saddled with the descriptor of “trip-hop.” It was a genre that died as soon as it was born. Each one of its main progenitors - Tricky, Massive Attack, and Portishead - took the sound that connected them in increasingly more unexpected directions.

The only one who ever really fulfilled the promise of their debut album though was Portishead. Their second self-titled album took the John Barry by way of J Dilla aesthetic and stripped it clean, leaving a bare, bleached out sound that was disconcerting to submit oneself to, but impossible to turn away from.

In the decade that has passed, the band’s two chief musical conspirators, Geoff Barrow and Adrian Utley, have apparently decided that the time was right to set any semblance of a playbook on fire for their new work.

From the start, the band sets out to leave the listener uneasy and unprepared for the way a song is going to move - just as the rumbling drumbeat and Bernard Herrmann strings have you in their sway in the closing minute of the opener “Silence”, the bottom drops out to, well, silence. Others like “Plastic” and “Machine Gun” toss in noisy interludes and stray bits of sound that appear to be field recordings of riveters.

The beats that Barrow concocts for this album are even more stripped down than before, relegated to a fractured boom-bap with a wash of sheet metal to back it up. Even in the most straightforward moments, like the gorgeous “Nylon Smile”, the muted snare heartbeat that carries the song isn’t left alone, getting undercut by the insect needling of Utley’s guitar.

Beth Gibbons has never sounded better than she does here. With musical tracks such as this, it shouldn’t be a surprise that Gibbons comes off as unhinged as she manages to do - see if you can get through the closing track “Threads” or “Plastic” without a chill running up your person at least once - but she manages to squeeze emotion out of even the most fractured of lyrics.

This is, so far, the most artful collection of songs to be released by a major band this year and is what the rest of the musical world should seek to aspire to: a record that leaves a permanent mark on your psyche.