(Originally published in Spring 2009)
I had a classmate who once identified the nineties as the decade of the vampire and our not-so-young one as that of the corpse. She offered an obscure hypothesis for this involving what it meant to be human in a post-9/11 world, what we feared in fiction and how that relates to what we fear in ourselves. It all hard a strange, free-associative logic; SARS and other chemical warfare had recently fueled a Newsweek-and-Time-led hype clockwork not unlike the ones driving those parts of culture we ostensibly like: film, music, and the like. Piecing it all together into a “corpse,” however, was tough to verbally qualify beyond vibe.
Point is, we had the eighties filed away as a cultural gestalt by the end of Bush Sr. But besides “grunge” – whose aftermath gets up in our grill in the form of the unanimously pukeworthy, your Nickelbacks, your Hoobastanks – we’re far too noncommittal these days to decide what to make of the nineties. My classmate wasn’t wrong. I wasn’t old enough at the time to dutifully track these things, but a visit to the Gothic-industrial crevice that was CBGB’s basement a few years ago (far removed from the club’s punk/hardcore rep, R.I.P.) stirred a sort of cultural memory for me. “Sexy evil,” you could call it: in the nineties the femme fatale had her rousing comeback. Check Garbage (cf. Version 2.0’s “I am a vampire”) and any number of others; check Trip Hop whose serpentine female vocals and molten filtered percussion were meme enough for Cocorosie to tap in 2007. And those sublunary basslines, ever burrowing, gave the whole movement a direction. Sneaker Pimps told us where: “6 underground,” whatever that means, whatever 6’s unit might be.
I’ve been told that someone in my generation can’t quite fathom just how ubiquitous Portishead were after Dummy came out in 1994. Car commercials? Really? The New Yorker’s Sasha Frere-Jones said that it no longer mattered what a band was singing about, a pretty female voice was going to get called Dinner Music. But for me, stamping that soundtrack over the nineties gives me a totally different picture of the decade. Slackers, Pavement, Weezer, sure: a part of everyone in Generation X wanted to descend right along with those basslines, hide beneath concrete and smeared mascara. The critics loved it at the time and love it even more now as one of those eminently listenable cultural documents.
It would be too cynical, even for me, to say people just don’t love albums, that albums just don’t define eras, the same way any more, but if you scan the weirdly homogenous handful of maybe 5 or so acclaimed albums in 2008, you’d be forgiven for wondering what revisionist history will make of them. Which brings me to Portishead’s Third. One year after an album has been released might seem like the worst time to revisit it – it’s either old news or preemptive canonization – but as we reluctantly close the curtains on the first decade of the millennium I can’t help but feel like the standard curt nod and (yawn) unanimous praise doesn’t get to the heart of why it really does define the post-millenial condition. Stakes get sky-high when groups reform long after their heyday, and it’s as easy to maliciously pummel them with “quit-while-ahead” ethos (The Stooges’ inane The Weirdness) as it is to congratulate them for “returning to form” or, more honestly, just staying afloat. Portishead represent the sort of exception we always must have believed in, if only in theory. That is to say, Third adds ideal balance to what could have looked like a flash-in-the-pan musical footnote. It completes their story.
The story is brief, but needs mentioning. “Glory Box,” the last track off Dummy and hit single, was premonitory. Portishead’s fondness for terse, evocative song titles reached a chilling apex. It envisioned Beth Gibbons a kind of Pandora, it was considered by some to be blatantly vaginal, but most of all, it provided the album’s cumulative angst a receptacle, a place to be locked away. The album’s second half had treated us to Beth’s best nasal-R&B yelp (“Numb”) and even a dubby Rastifarian croon (“Pedestal”), but still, nothing prepared us for the cold, jazzy sneer of “Glory Box.” She’s declarative: “I’m so tired of playing, playing with this bow and arrow / gonna give my heart away, leave to the other girls to play,” and “girls” gets a sinister little twist like a knife in her own heart. The song’s genius – which she later adopts in “Cowboy,” the first track off Portishead (1997) – is the way her wail, her final plea, “give me a reason to love you,” continually boils through that hell-soaked-Billie-Holiday veneer. It’s Gibbons’ pain as it was commodified in the nineties, to be sure, but the hiss and crackle of dusty vinyl that covers her voice in the verse situates her against an inner adversary.
My two cents is that Portishead lost something in the succeeding three years preparing for their followup, though most wouldn’t agree with me. Every musician reacts to their own fame differently, and amidst car-commercial shockwaves percussionist Geoff Barrow locked himself away (Kid-A-sessions-style), recording different instruments in snippets and pressing them to vinyl, playing back the vinyl, smearing them through layers of turntabling infidelity. Even though Dummy is the more sample-laden, it’s Portishead that feels like a cultural pastiche – ironically, of many sources that Dummy had helped to birth! Take as Exhibit A that layer of fuzz over everything Gibbons sings, the infinite poise of the femme fatale; take as the more head-scratching Exhibit B the mariachi brass snippet that acts as the skeleton of “All Mine.” This is the decent, the fallenness, the clog of Baudrillard’s simulacrum; if Portishead terrified us, it was because they had been bitten by the succubus that was the nineties, it was because there didn’t seem to be a drop of hope left.
“Higher highs and lower lows” is reductive, not to mention a bit boring, but it’s a good springboard to talking about Third. One thing I forgot to mention about “Glory Box”: partway through, the floor falls out from beneath it. I’m reminded of Emily Dickinson (as I am wont to be) and her broken “plank in reason” when she finally loses her mind. “This is the beginning of forever,” Gibbons’ voice reverbs infinitely through the emptiness, and then we, the listener, are in a world of massive pistons. It lasts I-don’t-know-how-few seconds before snapping, in that cruel pop song fashion, straight back to the self-isolating Gibbons. She terrifies us ever more when we know what’s underneath. This is why Third was necessary even eleven (a number the group has a strange affinity for) years after that second album which served as sealant, the lid to Gibbons’ glory box.
One end-of-year blurb likened the sounds on Third to the curved rust of Richard Serra’s sculptures, and I’ll agree that if it’s not sheer proximity it’s the way the sounds blot out the sun: rather than acting as the sounds’ skirting-surface, the music collapses around them. The easy analysis of the album’s first single, “Machine Gun,” is that it was, har dee har, taking that particular weapon to fans’ expectations. But moreover, we have a song that is literally born of chugging, yes, cyclic, violence. “Can’t anybody see/ we have a war to fight?” Gibbons asked on “Roads,” 15 years ago, but “Machine Gun” proves we were ‘bout capable as Congressmen of actually knowing what she meant. Gibbons’ life had stood a loaded gun; if Portishead display their age, it’s in thinking that any of the imeem dabblers would actually immerse themselves in the cinema of this track. Retrospectively, it would have been a great introduction to be flung into: in the last minute the song is sliced up by huge, “Welcome to the Machine”-styled keyboards. I won’t go overboard with the serendipity of the word “Machine” there (after all, Waters’ machine was social, bureaucratic, though I won’t say it wasn’t personal). Suffice to say, the keys function as a pan; the gunfire continues but constitutes a gristly vista.
Of course, the actual introduction to the album, and placement of “Machine Gun,” much better suits the arc of Third’s phantasmagoria. The spoken opening lines of “Silence” are in Portuguese, which might catapult some immediately into the sociological, but it’s best seen as proverbial, mythical, universal. A crude and scarcely hilarious Babel Fish translation churns out the choppy gist:
Esteja alerta para as regras dos 3 It is alert for the rules of the threeO que você dá, retornará para você What you of, will return for you
Essa lição você tem que aprender This lesson you: you have that to learn
Você só ganha o que você merece You only earn what you deserve
Deserve? What do I…? Then we’re off on a gallop that’s about 40 bpm faster than any previous opening track or, let’s be real here, any 1990’s Portishead song. If “Glory Box” saw Beth Gibbons falling, if the entire nineties were somehow about descent and Biblical fallenness, the finally ascending bass here is Lazarus or, to loop back to my classmate, the animation of the dead, the post-human.
The whirring, droning machines that characterize the album allude to one of the earliest efforts to inscribe pop music with the electronic, the inevitable: too-ignored Obscuro act Silver Apples. We can yelp plagiarism at the hamfisted similarities between Third’s horizontal centerpiece “We Carry On” (with its hiccuping enjambment: “on – and on – we carry on – but underneath – my mind – and on – and on – I tell – myself – it’s this – I can’t – disguise–”) and Silver Apples’ trick pony “Oscillations.” Or, we can go all bug-eyed that essentially the same sound that was produced in the late sixties can actually enliven one of the nineties’ definitive acts for the new millennium. Why deny the toolbox capacity of such a Euclidean gem? Silver Apples are pretty much the vertebrate of a proud lineage extending from Broadcast and Stereolab back to Kraftwerk and Neu!; thing is, no one’s turned it inward like this.
“Tormented in Silence / wounded and afraid inside my head / falling through changes,” Gibbons moans (Ah! To E.D. again: “And hit a world at every plunge…”) after a couple-minute exposition of flagellating drum brushes and a field of needle-tone darts. Critics are right to note that her characteristic voice is the thread stitching together what are, essentially, a collection of sound-art experiments; a little more confusing is that they claim this is what makes it “still Portishead,” considering the range of traditions into which Gibbons has dipped. When her voice first floated through airwaves, she was whiny enough to almost come off as self-mocking – “No-bah-day loves maaay, it’s true,” from “Sour Times” – which is the struggle her voice seems to have had ever since. So, is she ingrained enough, for the historically savvy, to get away with being “madd obvsies” on this album? I have a different theory: Gibbons as witness, a victim of her own vices (feel free to indulge in the homonymous mechanical imagery of “vise”), a slave to that hell-soaked-Billie-Holiday we’re always afraid might return.
The scariest her vocals get on Third is mere enigma – the dancing wraiths at the beginning of “Nylon Smile” are a transparent “Optimistic” homage. Coupled, however, with the wrenchlike honesty of “I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve you,” the sort of line that makes me continually vacillate betwee Lyrically, she defends her own sometimes-clumsy words by obsessing over the broadest inadequacies of language. Chronologically: “Wandered out of reach, too far to speak / drifting, unable”; “I never had a chance / to explain exactly what I meant”; “it’s just a thought / I’ve said enough”; “Better if I could find the words to say.” It’s not that we’re sick of Gibbons’ angst, but there seems to be an assumption that we will O.D. on it, that we’ll turn our ears to the shapes in her sky. The last track, “Threads,” is built around the most subdued of skulking guitar lines, the stitches holding her world together. “I had not minded – Walls –” Dickinson once declared, “Were Universe – one Rock –”:
But 'tis a single Hair –
A filament – a law –
A Cobweb – wove in Adamant –
A Battlement – of Straw –
The end of the album sees these filaments dissolved – Gibbons promised us in the first track repeatedly that the album takes place in Silence – leaving only a subhuman bellow. I used to have abstract nightmares, with no subjects or nouns, merely shapes, merely the inevitability of a massive wheel that couldn’t be stopped. The bellow that closes the album resurfaces over and over again, far longer than it would if the threads of the song were really its point. Gibbons, we realize, could be anyone, she could say anything, so long as we aren’t facing her world alone. Scott Walker’s enmeshed tumult leaps to mind; my Lord, if she had stung us with lyrics like the opening of “Cowboys”: “Reset in stone this stark belief / Salted eyes and a sordid dye / Too many years.”
It would be easy enough to tag this their darkest hour, yes, that they’ve joined the likes of Charalambides or Evangelista to construct a record too plumbing to pop on any day you like. But though by comparison a bit monochromatic, Dummy’s CD release planted the seed of salvation. Some call “It’s a Fire” the only unappealing track on their debut, and to be sure, it goes a long way in compromising their legacy. A beautiful ray of light – situated, incidentally, in the empty air between the two symmetric sides of the 10-track vinyl release – the song is in a winding array of major keys, all empty space filled with a pyrite church organ. It betrays a Dantian hell by defying the ever-inward pull of two-chord gravity, freely spiraling upward and outward. Harmonically, the song is a long single phrase repeated twice, and every time it modulates more space opens up. “This life is a farce, I can’t breathe through this mask like a fool,” Gibbons croons in a voice that a friend said would make Sarah McLaughlin envious. And by the end, it locks into a redemptive IV-I-V: “So breathe on, sister, like a fool.”
This is the lineage of, most notably, “The Rip” and “Deep Water.” The former’s Proxigean arpeggios, complete with nylon-string flubs, seems to be all about returning to “It’s a Fire”s space, choice, and hope, but there’s something oddly canned about the lyrics: “white horses will take me away”? What a confusing flood of emotions when the levee breaks, and a synthetic sequencer – simulacrum! – drowns out everything else. Beth has asked, “will I follow?” and that ringing note is held out in an inconspicuous loop for the rest of the song, masquerading as an overtone, a product of sheer acoustics. “Deep Water,” at less than two minutes, takes the form of a meandering antebellum hymn, up to and including the clipped Geoff-Barrow-harmonies echoing Gibbons’ sentiments. Postmodern white angst as slave spiritual – well, it would be fucking hegemonic to go any further with that, but the absorbed stereotype is virtually as real as hope can be in this world. Hope always becomes a part of something larger. Faith is a cog.
“The Rip” and “Deep Water” feel too damn good sonically to really realize that, though. They’re just refuges; Third’s philosophy only crystallizes into something ambivalent, something sublime beyond Good and Evil, with two back-to-back tracks at the end. It’s easy to miss that the line “Small” repeats over and over and over is “hating the Lord,” for it’s lethargic gospel overlaps. Gibbons’ voice is meticulously multitracked, but she deliberately hits certain notes about a quarter-step off with the trembling imprecision of a theremin. It’s bloody gorgeous: never was there such dialogic yearning as when some of the choir sorta want to go major, but all ultimately end up in the same place. The subsequent “Magic Doors” makes me nostalgic for the terse arcs of the “statement” albums which filled the first part of our decade but haven’t reared their head much since. Which is to say, by its very construction it could be nowhere else on the album: massive, uncannily familiar piano chords apocalyptic as falling bricks. But the record’s true climax, and a testament to the restless, compressed relationship to the avant-garde that defined acts like Pere Ubu and This Heat, lasts only a moment. The song stumbles over a writhing, sickly sax, a sound immediately familiar from free jazz, but it almost immediately starts to mold into a coherent shape. It reaches, fails. Then, more decisive, it reaches again, and is clamped within jaws of that piano. Its acontextual desperation had drawn it straight into the key of the song.
And God, I don’t know how that makes me feel. The thing about the phantasmagoria of Third is that nominally every aural shape “belongs” to the narrative voice that is Gibbons, and cognitive dissonance is played out palpably. Is it atonement or damnation when the reach of that barry sax fits into the cycle? Do we prefer the lock-groove “We Carry On” or the jagged start-stop of “Plastic”? The decade of the corpse: is it even worth reaching any more? “Often I’ve felt that I don’t wade / into the gift of my mistake,” Gibbons sings on that track, flinging around associative absolutes that somehow average out to the feeling we get from that miniscule clash of triumphs. Dickinson was obsessed with the power of single words not to bind, but to alter the gravitational pull of those astronomical elements of mind, words as Platonic axes and life as an aymptote. For her it was always strangely delicate observation of self, never self-satisfied, but also never a full-on war.
Donna Haraway and Kraftwerk saw the technology of every day life, the self-sustaining simulacrum in those clusters of LCD lights we call “folders,” as an opportunity for diplomacy, and maybe it’s that glimmer of a handshake that keeps me coming back to Third. When the bottom fell out of the glory box, when Beth Gibbons gave her heart away, Portishead could have been filed amongst countless others who did the same. Instead, when we most need it, their third album reaffirms our generation’s terrified, isolated humanity, cocooned in culture, in genes, in simulacra, in technology, in cycles. Fuck comeback: the album title is a spatial dimension.
-Collin Anderson
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