Third

Late last night, after everyone else had gone to bed, I gave a first listen to Portishead's Third, and let me say it was an altogether terrifying experience. Gone is the soft, chillout, trip-hop sound of Portishead's first releases from over ten years ago, being replaced by a harshness created through heavy electronic distortion and loud, abrasive samples (such as the gunshots on the track "Machine Gun".) The vocal stylings of Beth Gibbons now sound ghostly and ethereal instead of soothingly calm, and the album feels like a haunted house with thrills and surprises around every corner.

Third may contain some of the scariest music I've heard since Scott Walker's The Drift, and it even evokes some of the same feelings as that album, though the pieces are not as extreme or avant-garde. Still, the music is extraordinarily dark and erratic, with dramatically changing moods at little to no notice. Several times throughout the album, after drifting into a sort of hypnotic state created through repeated psychedelic swirls, I was blasted awake by loud percussion as the album turned in a completely different direction. Despite this, the music is still beautiful, just in an extraordinarily haunting sort of way. Some more typical melodies immediately stand out, such as "The Rip" and "We Carry On," while others such as "Nylon Smile" and "Plastic" seem to need more listens to be fully appreciated. The entire album is very cohesive, and the full 50 minutes is definitely a unique, must-hear experience. However, I feel like it's the kind of cerebral music that needs to take root deep inside the brain over the time (in a similar way to Dummy,) and so I can't offer a definitive opinion after just one listen. Needless to say, I'm intrigued: Third will definitely grace my headphones with its presence many more times in the future.