Dazed but unhurt Anna (Jacqueline Sassard) crushes her fiancé William (Michael York) beneath her spike-heeled foot as she steps on his face while trying desperately to climb out of the over-turned car.

Fractured relationships leading to tragedy. Minor sexual indiscretions ending in death. Directed by Joseph Losey, written by Harold Pinter. The Accident, a 1967 film. “Beware to the rule of three. What you give comes back to you,“ sings Beth Gibbons in a weak, faltering voice on Silence, track 1 of Portishead 3.

An African shuffle beat, a cold synth carrying a menacing melody, pierced by a pulsing post-punk guitar “Tormented inside. Drifting unable. Wounded inside my head. Falling through changes,” she continues, the elastic vibration of a synth racing faintly behind her for no apparent reason.

The beat returns, then the frightened vocal fades out, the insidious creep of guitar instrumentation taking over as if it was its right. Then at the five-minute mark without warning the song is cut dead like the slash of a knife. A far from easy listen, Portishead’s Third is a story of an identity crisis, of horror and, as in all really scary movies, the real horror lies within.

It's highly unlikely ever to be played in polite company, in contrast to their last two albums spread thinly across the last 14 years, Dummy (1994) and Portishead (1997) Portishead still make music a little like you’d make a film soundtrack, but the tip-toeing, light jazz feel of a late 1950s torch song updated for the electronic, post-Rave generation has mostly gone. The Ipcress File this is not.

Only track three, the Asian-flavoured Nylon Smile and track ten, Magic Doors could have sat comfortably on the albums that made their name and their fame in the days when fellow ‘trip-hop‘ band Massive Attack also somehow insinuated their way into the pop charts.

Portishead 3 is an album that deconstructs the group’s own painstakingly crafted sound and in doing so unsettles the listener deeply, an unusual course of action in this day and age for a successful band.  Steeped in the streaked reds of a frozen nightmare, a Francis Bacon painting rather than film noir, the biggest difference is in the choice of instrumentation; more varied in nature and more extreme in use. 

The first shock is the use of acoustic guitars. Portishead were never known for their rural sounds before, their claustrophobic mini-soundscapes smacking of urban Bristol where the worlds of dub reggae, DJ culture, pop, soul and rock are all close neighbours.  For the first time in their history, there’s a pastoral feel to the band, at least there would be if it wasn’t being constantly undermined by post-punk and Krautrock influences.

Instrumentation doesn’t blend together on Portishead 3, it clashes and erupts, creating antagonism and contrasts. Militaristic percussion and drums reminiscent of Joy Divison; the occasional African or Asian beat; ugly, doom-laden church-like organ, weird electronic beeps and bops; distorted sax; strident lead guitar lines from the early days of prog rock and that alarm bell scratchiness of post-punk lead guitars. Six of the tracks come to surprisingly abrupt halts, the remaining five fade unfashionably quickly. From start to finish, the album is full of the very destabilising elements that would have spoilt the mood the band once worked so hard to create.

Track 2, Hunter: A sparse and spooky 60s psych folk ballad, lovely in its melancholic sadness, until the listener is jolted by a series of sonic shocks. Such as: The ping of guitar reverb echoing like the acceleration of a high-speed car played back in slow motion. An interjecting, crazy, repetitive, minimalist keyboard line in the style of a cat chasing its own tail.
Track 5 - Plastic: The trademark Portishead sound of old led by Gibbons’ despairing voice, more painful than ever before, disrupted by the following in sequence: An electronic sound equivalent to a shuddering helicopter rota blade chopping through the air. The dramatic arrival of strident Krautrock keyboards and heavy crashing drums and cymbals. Finally, a fat, fuzzy synth like an ugly swarm of bees. Track 9 - Small: A similar pattern here except the setting of acoustic guitar and lonely voice is punctured by weird electronic effects from the school of 60s cult figure Delia Derbyshire and dramatic Germanic keyboards resounding like a murder in the monastery. This nearly lovely little tune climaxes in one minute of wailing lead guitar and feedback straight from Faust or early, more experimental Tangerine Dream.

The Portishead of old made their name by updating that smoky, old-fashioned Ronnie Scott’s light jazz ambience for a modern audience, replacing what would once have been all brushes and double bass with languid electronica.  The atmospheric instrumental backing was there to produce an icy sadness in which singer Beth Gibbons could play the wounded lover in a traditional romance.  Tracks such as Wandering Star couldn‘t be called happy; the tone was slightly sinister even then, but it was always delivered in a consistent, linear almost comforting fashion. The pleasure for the listener came in the delicate creation of tone and texture and the patience release of the underlying melodies. Melancholic, certainly, though not enough to disturb your average dinner party where, at the peak of Britpop, you could occasional hear Dummy played low in the background while guests happily chitter- chattered round a crowded kitchen table.

No one in their right mind would try that with Portishead 3 where Gibbons’ vocals have never sounded so tortured or despairing. The lyrics may still talk occasionally of love; Beth Gibbons remains the quintessential tragic romantic, but they could no longer write anything as conventional as “I’m so tired of playing with this bow and arrow, I’ve been a temptress for too long. . .I just want to be a woman.” (Glory Box, 1994). Or this: “It could be sweet like a long forgotten dream, cos I don’t wanna lose what we had last time.” (It Could Be Sweet, 1994).  On Portishead the words are as fractured as the music, thoughts dribbling out into virtual nonsense, reflecting a mental state that’s as unstable as the sounds.  “I can’t deny what I’ve become. I’m just emotionally undone. . .I don’t know who I’m meant to be,” Gibbons sings on track 10, Magic Doors.  “I struggle with myself, hoping I might change myself, hoping that I might be someone I wanna be,” she adds on track 3, Nylon Smile.  Elsewhere, all is confusion, paranoia and pain which goes beyond the normal heartache of an affair gone wrong or love discarded or destroyed.

“I’m always so unsure.” (Threads).
 “I stand on the edge of a broken sky, so confused” (Hunter).
“No place is safe” (Nylon Smile).
“I bleed the taste of life” (We Carry On).
It’s as if Gibbons was trying to shake off the ghosts that plague her waking dreams and, perhaps, she is literally haunted.

The album’s sinister, new-found-acoustic approach has worrying hints of cult movie The Wickerman (1973) and its story of pagan worship and human sacrifices on a remote Scottish island.  Track 1, Silence, starts not with those African drums previously mentioned but with some ancient-sounding sampled verse about The Threefold Law. Spoken by Claudio Campos, a master of the Brazilian art form Capoeira, it turns out to be a central moral tenet of Wicca, a pagan, nature-based religion inspired partly by the writings of Aleister Crowley.

You can only hope a flirtation with this peculiarly English form of witchcraft hasn’t infected either Portishead or Will Gregory, a guest musician on loan from Goldfrapp, whose current album Seventh Tree opts for an even more pronounced acoustic-driven, semi-religious pastoralism at the expense of their spangly super-disco.  Whatever the roots of Portishead’s radical change of direction on Portishead 3, track 8, Machine Gun, suggests lead singer Gibbons and long-time fellow songwriters Adrian Utley, engineer, and Geoff Barrow, mixer, aren’t afraid to look at the roots of terror right in the eye.

“If only I could see, return to me, and recognise the poison in my heart,” sings a distraught, almost pathetic Gibbons to a backing made in robotic hell on one of the most uncompromising tracks ever to be released as a single by a major band.

Completely electronic, dominated by the echoing rattle of a relentless drum machine as steely as the unflinching gaze of the little drummer boy Oskar Matzerath in the movie version of The Tin Drum, Gunter Grass’ 1959 novel of a traumatic childhood in Nazi Germany, Machine Gun is the sound of punishment.

The question is who is punishing Gibbons, unseen outside forces or herself? As the intensity builds rather than dissipating; it’s clear there is going to be no happy ending here. Even the arrival of a beautiful but glacial synth riff straight from Vangelis’s soundtrack of Ridley Scott's 1982 movie Blade Runner can’t shake the song’s inner violence off its course.  It has to end somewhere and it does. At 4 min 39sec Machine Gun is suddenly cut off in its prime, though the listener fears that somewhere out of earshot its stomping boot are marching on into eternity.

As for that stately synth, on first listen it seemed an inappropriate choice for such brutal surroundings. Perversely it’s the core of the track’s effectiveness. With the unexpected arrival of a melody, it’s as if Gibbons was turning a reflective eye on her own misery, making rounded what would otherwise have been a hard-edged, sado-masochistic dance track. Then no mood is left undisturbed on Portishead 3, nothing is that simple, the band are no longer so one-dimensional. On previous albums, their music sounded deep frozen in soft melancholy. Here real danger is all around Gibbons, coming from within and without, that’s what all the unexpected changes of instrumentation, incongruous noises and sudden endings and fadeouts are meant to achieve.  That’s why the otherwise tranquil Magic Doors, track 10, is assaulted by an outburst of distorted, twisted sax, the track’s seemingly random elements mirror the singer’s own battle for control of both herself and outside events.  It may sound Portishead’s loosest, wildest album to date but nothing is really happening by chance. Everything is still being sculpted carefully in the mix and melody still plays a vital role.  Without its harvest of hooklines this darkest of albums would not only be unlistenable, in the absence of light and shade its horror would also fail to ring true.

The single key to understanding the nature of Portishead 3 and what makes it such a great album is  track 4, The Rip.
Beginning in reflective mode with a circling acoustic guitar refrain and sad keyboard line, Gibbons breathy vocals about “wild, white horses” taking her away, it’s seems at first to be an enigmatic, Ingmar Berman movie from a black and white 1950s, luxuriating in its own melancholic juices.  Then at 2.12 min Gibbons moans “oh” and a warm, electronic riff swells up from nowhere full of melody and passion. Whatever tragic events she is singing about, the arrival of the other woman “scented and tall,“ are no longer in the past, they’ve been conjured back, bang into the present.  At a flash the movie is in full vibrant technicolor but, once again, it’s a horror film,  powerful and vibrant, like Dario Argento’s Inferno (1980) about the disappearance of a woman in a New York City apartment building that also served as a home for a powerful, centuries-old witch.  Though faded in the mix, the vocal “oh” doesn’t entirely disappear, nothing truly goes away on this album, that fragile “oh” carries on unnaturally so until the 2.59 min mark.  It’s as if Gibbons would like to bury her demons once and for all but, like that warm synth line itself, they are too strong, too forceful to be laid to rest. On the edge of cracking up, she could be Siouxsie Sioux on Suburban Relapse from The Scream (1978) whose “string snapped” and who’s thinking of exposing herself to strangers or throwing things at the neighbours or even killing herself.  Or she could be Carol (Catherine Deneuve) in Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965).  Sexually repressed, pushed over the edge into a nervous breakdown, she takes refuge in the narrow confines of her South Kensington flat.  Prowling the corridors, the shadows grow, hands reach out from the walls, grabbing her, no safety is to be found.  Beautifully lit, it’s terrifying and wonderful at the same time just as Portishead 3’s loveliest moments co-exist with ugliness and vice a versa.  The past is the present and the present the past. Everything comes back. Nothing is resolved by the final track, 11, Threads whose defeated vocals and creeping grunginess eventually fades away to be replaced by an single ominous synth note, booming away like a warning for passing ships from a lighthouse in the dark, spelling out one word - danger.  It’s as if all these years on, Portishead’s flirting with the romance of tragedy has been replaced by a deeper understanding of how dreadful and magical life is and what close bedfellows they both truly are.

Portishead no longer make music suitable for the cocktail set, it’s too strong even for the surrealism and satire of say David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986) which, despite its own twisted darkness, is essentially a film about innocence. There’s little of that to be found here.  A hard album to like but an impossible one not to be impressed by, Portishead 3 is not destined to sell in large quantities, which makes its existence even more of a miracle.  Sometimes it's hard to believe what you're hearing, a band of Portishead’s calibre brave enough to take strong melodies and subject them to such powerful instrumental abuse, not for the sake of idle experimentation but to produce a genuinely emotional experience.

By confronting the horrors of life full on Portishead have finally proved they have a heart.
 

Graham Chalmers
 

© Modern Music Review (2008)