Week 19: Portishead - Third (2008)

“Esteja alerta para a regra dos três/O que você dá, retornará para você/Essa lição você tem que aprender/Você só ganha o que você merece”

(“Be alert to the rules of three/What you give, will be returned/That lesson, you have to learn/You only earn what you deserve.”)

     -     Spoken word intro to “Silence” (translation here, rewritten slightly be me)

While American rock hit a peak of anger and unintelligibility, the UK was intent on calming down. Whether it was a reaction to the harder-than-ever rock coming from across the pond or simply an outgrowth of the rave scene and its signature drug, E, is impossible to know, but the reality of England’s big chill in the 90s is inarguable. The rock music exported from the country during this period, as a rule, was less aggressive and distorted than the American counterpart. The singing was cleaner too. 

The strongest contrast though was between the two countries’ respective hip-hop trends. While the gangsta rap of NWA and Ice-T, as well as the abrasive hard rap of Public Enemy and martial sound of the Wu-Tang Clan, was the rule of thumb for mainstream rap in the early and mid-90s (the West Coast sound, exemplified by De La Soul, was an exception rather than the rule) over in the US, the UK had perfected and centralized the Bristol sound of trip-hop. Then hailed as the first truly original English rap genre (the garage sound of The Streets was years away, then), trip-hop became a household name with the advent of Massive Attack’s debut album, Blue Lines, and breakout single, “Unfinished Sympathy”, in 1991.

Although Blue Lines was a great success itself, “Unfinished Sympathy”, which featured singer-songwriter Shara Nelson to the exclusion of the bands other vocal members, such as Tricky, was far more important in the future shape of the trip-hop. The hip-hop inspired rhythms, strings, and soaring vocals became calling cards of the genre in the years to come, much more so than any actual rapping. Although neither future Massive Attack songs nor Tricky’s debut album, Maxinquaye (a classic itself), followed the formula of “Sympathy”, the die had nevertheless been cast. 

One of the reasons the string-and-vocal formula for trip-hop may have found such disproportionate success compared to the drum-and-rap version was the clear pop antecedents for the former. Trip-hop in general can be linked to quiet storm thanks to the low-key aesthetic and slow tempo, but those jazz influences are much more obvious in the mellower trip-hop songs like Zero 7’s “In The Waiting Line”. One could also link the successes found by vocal-focused trip-hop to Depeche Mode, who were at the height of their powers in 1990 thanks to the release of Violator. It’s not difficult to link the bass heavy synthpop of Depeche Mode (or similar acts like Pet Shop Boys and their signature single, “West End Girls”) with the sound of trip-hop. One could trace the genealogy even farther back, to acts like Joy Division, but this borders on excessive.

The main point is that the more baroque form of trip-hop (baroque hop?) saw major successes on both sides of the Atlantic, with US groups like Sneaker Pimps, Thievery Corporation, and Noonday Underground appearing in the wake of Massive Attack. The genre proved long-lived, with the latter two not appearing until the late-90s and similar groups like Goldfrapp and The XX still enjoying moderate pop victories.

Those jazz influences are also apparent in the early work from Portishead, the other major Bristol-based trip-hop group of the early 90s. Their 1994 debut, Dummy, is rife with songs that, with lighter percussion and cleaner production, could be mistaken for something off a 50s jazz station. Unsurprisingly, two of the songs with the clearest relationship to that classic past, “Sour Times” and “Glory Box”, were successful singles for the band, with the latter featuring on the soundtrack for Liv Tyler’s breakthrough 1996 feature film, Stealing Beauty. These influences were diminished on the group’s next, self-titled album, but they were still fairly apparent on the most successful single from that album, “Only You”. While the notoriety of that song owes mainly to the music video by Chris Cunningham, I have little doubt that the fact that it’s the least challenging song from that album played some part.

The shades of blue that were so apparent on their most successful songs vanished completely on Third, Portishead’s third (surprise!) album. There’s little of any kind of color on the album really; this album is closer to the industrial music produced by Nine Inch Nails in the early 90s (ironic, considering that same band produced an ambient album, Ghosts I-IV that same year). More American than English, one might say.

Keeping the above in mind, Third is essentially the sound of infanticide. I can’t think of another band that has so definitively cut themselves off from their aural foundation as Portishead did with this album. Even Radiohead progressed towards their musical about-face Kid A with the heavily produced, electronica-tinged OK Computer. Portishead, in stark contrast, followed up their last single, “Only You”, with “Machine Gun”. I can’t help but think the implied attack against their past was very much planned.

While “Machine Gun” is probably the most industrial song on the album, the rest of it is only really accessible in fits and spurts. “Hunter” flirts with the old Portishead style but undercuts it with rapidly changing textures and instrumentation. “Threads”, the last track of the album, mirrors their debut album’s closer “Glory Box” with its somnambulistic pacing, but the ominous choral crescendos keep it from sounding too familiar. The third orthodox track, “Deep Water”, seems to be an allegory for domestic abuse, making it another leap from the mainstream.

Other parts of the album are unusual simply due to their association with Portishead. Aside from “Machine Gun”, a song that invokes both Jimi Hendrix and The Clash in title, “Magic Doors” also transforms the band’s drummer from jazz to noise rock.  Note that both were released as singles from the album, along with “The Rip”, a more otherworldly, synth-heavy take on the classic Portishead song. While this industrial sound for the drums was presaged on many of the songs from Portishead, it’s much more focused upon in those two songs; the fact that they were released as singles is a sign that Portishead wished to make their heavier, darker sound part of their identity.

That factory floor (or killing floor, maybe?) sound is what defines the center of the album, “Plastic” and “We Carry On”, which are practically avant-garde. While the former is merely amelodic, the latter is dissonant in a way that can’t be by simple mistake or oversight. This is manufactured difficulty, an example of the kind of wall that I remarked on in my post on The Moon & Antarctica. This is, again, an American influence, and the fact that Portishead themselves were credited as the album’s producer makes me wonder if it’s actually the kind of thing they wanted to do all along.

What makes the album listenable and, in my opinion, important, is the band’s firm grounding in pop fundamentals. There’s a minority opinion in the music world that “Revolution 9”, as a song, is one of a scant few that qualifies as avant-pop, simply because John Lennon’s compositional instincts kept him from abandoning himself fully to the musique concrete ideal of accidental music. It’s what gives that song its uncanny effect: it resembles, but isn’t necessarily, music. That balancing act is what gives the song an edge, and I’d argue that the same applies to “Plastic” and “We Carry On”.

The rest of the album may be the radical, deliberate, and even violent departure I argued for above, but it doesn’t mean that Portishead were committing some free-association experiment on Trent Reznor’s studio floor. These are still songs; Portishead is attacking their past, not pop music as a whole. If anything, the radical departure the band made from their trip-hop roots makes this album more worthwhile to listen to, simply because it’s something new.

The quest for new sounds and new styles is so fundamental to the music snob lifestyle that even The Muppet Show made fun of it. Hell, people getting excited about the sounds of worms underground doesn’t even seem that bizarre, people were excited about One Pig, remember. Novelties like that may not be worth more than a single listen (if that) but any music that attempts to tread new ground, whether for the artist or the listener, can be worth it either for its ability to scratch a specific itch in a music lover’s ear or for the excitement one can hear in the band’s performance. This seems like a labor of love to me, an effort made by Portishead to reach for a new sound rather than simply retread old, tired ground.

What’s really interesting is the ground they chose to explore. Fusing the calm detachment of typical English electronica and electropop with the harshness of the American alternative has been done before, sometimes with great success, and the fact that it may be something of a natural evolution for the genre is interesting. It is, after all, a bit difficult to make calm music calmer. While an artist can make their instrumentation more varied (compare Morphine’s “Buena” to the later “Rope On Fire”, for example) or alter their lyrical themes, the most effective kind of change is often to push their blue sounds into the red, so to speak.

Portishead don’t go as far as Prodigy (unfortunately; that would be amazing to hear), settling for something in-between Kraftwerk’s robotic apathy and Nine Inch Nails’ seething rage. It’s a take on trip-hop that pushes it closer to the genre’s hip-hop and electronica roots, pruning the flowers that “Unfinished Sympathy” grew on the vine. It’s a regression similar to what the garage rock revival movement attempted: a primitivism that rejects elaboration and excess. That Portishead, who started off with the vocal-string formula, were the ones to accomplish this, rather than Massive Attack, is surprising, but not unprecedented. It makes me anxious to hear what’s next.

Cheers. See you in 7 days.