This ain't your high school brooding past self's Portishead. It's heavier, darker, more disconcerting - and, astonishing to say, even better.
Third is a journey down a dark motorway, anxious and foreboding and at times positively menacing, but with a heartbeat and the reassuring sound of breathing, however at times fraught, underneath throughout. The beats and rhythms churn and skitter at times (on pulsating opener "Silence", the menacing mid-record emergency siren dash of "We Carry On", or the IDM-crashing "Machine Gun", say), but they're just as likely to be gently, breathily moog-y (I'm thinking especially of the second half of "The Rip") or even, as on the startling voice-and-banjo "Deep Water" or the Hem-meets-Goldfrapp (both at their most hushed) "Small", altogether non-existent.
Highlights for me at this point are "Silence", "Hunter", "The Rip" and "Magic Doors" (this album's "Teardrop", to draw a parallel to a not altogether dissimilar record of the band's once-contemporaries Massive Attack), but the record works best as a whole - as a single flowing stream in which the listener's immersed. Gibbons' voice is still amazing, and the thread running through it all; the melodies are still seemingly dialled in from the universe next door to ours via some weirdly clean-edged static, wrapped up in ether-soaked cotton wool for good measure.
It's also reminded me of how great those two older lps are - Dummy in particular meant an awful lot to me in high school (it was the first 'slow' album that I ever really took to heart, and I've retained strong impressions of walking around the schoolyard and in the suburbs at night listening to my tape of it, not to mention the first amazed thrill of discovering "Roads" and "Glory Box" through late-night, on-the-verge-of-sleep, radio listening) - but it does seem to me to be even better than those older ones, or if not 'better' as such then at least much more of the now, which in these circumstances perhaps amounts to the same thing.
