Third

This album is so cool. What else sounds like this? It's bursting with ideas! To me this album has a clear point of view, it sounds like impending danger, like fear of the future. It's dark and anxious. I love it

If my anxiety had a soundtrack it would be this album. No thanks.

One of few albums I've heard being so weird yet really pulling it off. Industrial, apocalyptic yet soft. 4.5 on first listen.

This album was boring. I like ambient beeps and boops, but these beeps and boops bored me

Triphop-a-riffic!

You're in for a real treat if you enjoy bleeding from your ears.

J'ai bien entendu toujours horreur de Portishead. Rien ne colle entre la voix, les instruments et la mélodie mais venons-en à l'essentiel. Vous savez probablement que la dernière mise à jour du générateur et sa fonctionnalité permettant de voir quels reviews étaient les plus "likés" du site a propulsé mon nom de robbelvédère en haut de l'affiche. Ma notoriété dépasse aujourd'hui très largement le cadre de ce site et il ne se passe pas un jour sans que l'on m'arrête dans la rue. "Robbelvédère ! Robbelvédère ! J'ai adoré ton review d'Abbey Road !" entendais-je encore ce matin. Et c'est là que ça coince. J'ai rappelé à la charmante demoiselle qui prononça ces mots que ma carrière ne se résumait pas à ce simple review et que j'en avais rédigé pas loin d'une cent-cinquantaine tous plus inspirés que les autres. Je me sens aujourd'hui comme doit probablement se sentir Jean-Marie Bigard quand on l'arrête dans la rue pour lui dire à quel point on aime son sketch de la chauve-souris. "Et mon sketch de la merde qui tombe dans la cuvette, c'est de la chiasse pour vous ?" doit sûrement penser l'intéressé. En bref, je vous conseille vivement de ne pas vous arrêter à mon "hit review" et de lire les autres avec la même attention.

Such a cool and unique sound, so much anguish. Every song can be interpreted differently by everyone. There are some very sweet moments like Deep Water. Singing isn't the most controlled, but contributes to their authenticity

Such a unique style. This album is like a soundtrack to a dark, confusing dream. A great application of electronic instruments to create a feeling of uneasiness.

Music to play while you and your friends sneak into a graveyard in high school

"Third" is the third studio album and first in 11 years from Bristol UK band Portishead. This is quite the intense listen. It was a move away from trip hop on their previous albums and influenced and incorporating Krautrock rhythms, breakbeats, cathedral, Morrocan drums, soft rock, doo wop and science fiction/horror soundtracks. I can attest to that; there is so much going on throughout this album. In a nutshell, it's experimental electronic music. The one constant is Beth Gibbons' vocals giving each song a mysterious feel along with the music. And, Portishead is Beth Gibbons, Geoff Barrow and Adrian Utley. Each band member seems to play every instrument at some point: various keyboards, dums and pecussion, bass, guitars and more. The album start with "Silence" and a Potuguese vocal sample and foreboding keyboards. Some sort of drum loop going on. Maybe about the Golden Rule. "The Rip" was the second single and begins with a weird acoustic guitar. The vocals are haunting and seem to be about a broken relationship. The music transitions with synthesizers coming upfront sounding like the "Stranger Things" intro music. The albums' second half has two more of their released singles. "Machine Gun" was the lead single and starts with a mechanical rhythm, definitely sounding like a machine gun, which eventually gives way and builds with synthesizers and keyboards. It has cryptic lyrics and appears to be another one about a broken relationship. Their last single " Magic Doors" has a weird drum beat beginning and background synthesizers which eventually come to the forefront. Beth Gibbons' vocals dominate the song and again have a mysterious, cryptic meaning...sexual orientation? depression? Every song is unique on this album; I think I could listen to this 20 times and find something different each time with everything going on. I found this album fantastic and recommend it to anyone willing to take a deep dive into experimental electronic music.

Tough listen. Really hampered by the vocals. I'm sure there are people out there who are into this but it's so mopey and dark. The instruments aren't awful (albeit maybe a bit boring) but yeah, not great. 3.5/10 (1.75/5)

Thanks to this project, I now know what the love child of Robert Wyatt and Bjork sounds like and it is this. I will pay you to turn it off.

I can't for the life of me work out what the point of this is, let alone why it would appear on a list of albums I need to hear before I die. There's bugger all meaningful structure, no ups or downs, amazingly little substance and it's not particularly musical or even dissionant enough to raise an eyebrow.... it just exists. for 50min. Is anyone out there dull enough that they'd list this as their favourite album ever? Thank fuck I had a couple of other things on the boil while this played, because if I'd had nothing else to do I think I'd still be sitting there waiting for this to finish. What a boring, absolute non-event of an album. 1/5.

Has some significance as the soundtrack to a romance of mine many moons ago that died on its ass, but that doesn't make me any more disposed to accept the dreaminess they peddle so insistently as anything more than a cloak for emotional inarticulacy they find too expedient to grow beyond and lethargy they're too comfortable disguising with bursts of what appears to be energy but only because they build to it from a near stationary starting point.

Talk about bleak... this seems like the perfect accompaniment to my increasingly frequent moments of despair. The lead singer ranges from worn to desperate accentuated with occasional banshee moments. Some highlights: “The Rip” has a lovely vocal performance and really wonderful synthesizers. I love this song. Ends in such lushness. “Deep Water” is an odd ukulele piece in the album that still felt strangely in place as the most positive-feeling song here. I like it. “We Carry On” is a fast, relentless song that may be the best option if you wanted to dance to something on this album. I loved it. The out of tune guitar strumming leads into a section where the song feels on the verge of flying apart, but I found it very satisfying when it did not. “Magic Doors” feels like one of the more personal feeling songs on the album. I love its odd beats, the accordion, and the vocal performance. What a brilliant song! “Threads” closes the album with the lyrics “I am one, Damned one, Where do I go?” It’s got quite an ending with a lone bellowing, evil horn. Chilling. Where their debut album “Dummy” was something I could listen to as I worked, “Third” might be a little too ominous for that. It has now been 14 years since this album was released. I don’t know if Portishead will ever release another, but it would be interesting to see where they go from this dark place. I was very unsure initially how I felt about THIRD. On the second time through it came together for me and I fell in love with this album. THIRD is exceptional - and perfect for the world I’m living in.

A faixa inicial me surpreendeu, já que começa com uma fala em português. A banda é inglesa. Falava sobre a "regra dos três". Li que é de um capoeirista de Bristol. O som é incrível! A fala também. Várias experimentações sonoras. Rico demais.

Familiar with Portishead's early material but never got around to this album. Happy to say it holds up for me, this will enter my regular rotation.

i really like this damn sound. kind of free jazz pop music.

Creepy vibes, weird instrumentals, jarring transitions. I get what the album was going for, and it isn't enjoyable to listen to. Each song has a theme and they all suck. The music is painful to the ears, and the vocals sound stagnant and bland throughout. I thought maybe the premise alone would keep it from a 1 star review, but the longer it went on, the clearer it became that wasn't the case. I certainly won't be going back to this anxiety inducing melodrama anytime soon.

I was originally upset this album wasn't a continuation of Dummy or Portishead but it really grew on me.

A really pleasant surprise this. The Rip and We Carry On are beautiful songs. I like Massive Attack, but always avoided Portishead (maybe because of the name, sounds like a toilet). Not everything works - Plastic is a bit rubbish, but enough does work. Spooky, atmospheric, haunting, and fresh. Am between a 4 and a 5, but I think I'll give in.

Absolutely love this album.

I completely forgot about portis

Fantastic album. Haunting and somber.

Talent at its finest

super chill hunter and the rip are bops

good songs

I can’t decide if this excellent background music or if it’s terrible since I keep getting distracted trying to listen to the lyrics. The abrupt ending to song one also threw me for a loop. Digging this record though.

A leap to obscure instrumentation and the abandonment of simpler, catchier song structures bring out what’s consistent about Portishead: the spooky, indecisive and menacing mood, its embodiment in Beth Gibbons’ pre-war ghost voice, the Spaghetti Western and jazz embroidery, and sonic choices that are deliberately anachronistic, dated in a forcefully unsettling manner. Theremin sounds too, I suppose. The three year old is taken by “We Carry On”, repeating the mantra-like vocals without understanding. As I treasure many of the sounds and genres being détourned here, this is leng.

I’m on a train and some of the sounds in the album confused me bc I couldn’t tell if it was the song or the train. I think the combo of the instrumental and the voice is interesting and I like it.

Better than I remembered

Better than expected. A pleasant surprise with the vocals. Those melodies were cool.

Less a collection of songs than a cluster of interesting noises, some of which I enjoyed more than others. Sounds more like BEAK> than earlier Portishead.

I like its darkness and creativity, even if it still carries a lot of what I used to hold against Dummy back in the day : it rarely takes off and tends to stay locked in the same mood. Still, there are some nice guitar touches, and the atmosphere manages to move beyond the band’s original trip-hop roots, which keeps it from being just background music. Despite that evolution — and the 14 years between the two albums — you immediately know it’s Portishead. That’s one of the marks of the greats.

Heresy to say this, I’m sure, but I found this album much more interesting than Dummy. It’s not as monotonous and drone-y. The different stylistic twists and turns make for a more enjoyable record and there are some legitimately cool moments, like the doubled up synth solo at the end of Machine Gun. Portishead is still not my cup of tea, but this record gets closer than Dummy does.

I enjoyed it. Nothing stood out but it was soothing to listen to. Would give it another, more thorough listen, perhaps.

Didn’t enjoy the vibes of this one. Not my thing.

The singer sounds like a ghost Sounds like the type of music you'd hear coming from a dodgy nightclub. No thanks - avoid 2 ⭐️

Unerträglich

terrible. what was that garbage.

Not for me

BAD.

This was the musical equivalent of prepping for a colonoscopy.

1.5

Album: Third Artist: Portishead Year: 2008 Album #: 300 (264 rated) first impressions: I feel like this is supposed to be an influential album and artist so...I was looking forward to it, but now I'm looking forward to the end. This just seems like if Radiohead decided to make songs without traditional structure and more synths and truly grating, mewing vocals. after listening through: the song "Plastic" is honestly one of the worst tracks I've listened to as part of this project; "Deep Water" is like, the origin story of the awful twee ukelele hiphop YouTube covers of the early 2010s? The rest is like, the Social Network Soundtrack mashed up with Kid A, but replaced with the vocals of the woman who sings at 8 am mass at my parents' church. post-reading reviews/wiki: ...did I listen to the same album people love? I guess I really just don't like Trip Hop. recommended for: someone who hates melody in their music and just wants.. slightly unpleasant noise.

Um

Reminded my Why I don’t like Portishead…

I never really knew why I never got into Portishead back in the day. Now I know why. I just could not get into this at all.

Strange and electronic, and not for me. Felt like it was tracks by Massive Attack but under LSD. Not much in the way of replay for me, and definitely not for my listening pleasure

Constant dissonance, depressive soft spoken and sometimes drifting out of key. Minor differences between songs. If you enjoy that, this is for you. But this was not for me.

Yeah this ain’t it

Discordant and tuneless. How the mighty fallen

Not a fan

Not my thing. At all. *Yawns*

Every song seems like a song that’s not even close to being done. Her vocals seem like placeholders and instrumental sections go on for too long with not enough change.

I never listened to this third album. Never knew it existed. I wasn't missing much. Don't like it.

Did not enjoy.

no

Do you remember that girl you noticed, The one in the city centre. She was dressed like Stevie Nicks meets Primark, In a crowed of 20 something olds. Shouting at a government with no general direction!. You walk up to this woman with your secret weapon of a medium Toffee latte from Costa. You pretend to care about what ever this collection of sandals are shouting about. You get woman’s name...it’s “Meadow” because why not. “Meadow” will go out for a drink but not for any old drink but for a drink to a little place she knows! . A little place with a band, a band filled with “Meadows” friends. You get to the underground bar literally..it’s a cellar in A 1960s St Katharine Docks ..Taylor Woodrow apartment redevelopment cellar. You sit with “Meadows” crossed legged on the floor, on a cushion, while an Ale in a jam jar is placed on the old cable drum table in front of us. As I start to feel out of place within the weed filled walls, Walls painted with that fidel castro silhouette all over ( because it’s 2009 and it’s original!...from the Gap ) I think even though “Meadows” looks the double of Mélanie Laurent, I can’t do this and her Ecology Degree I have to leave now before it’s too late. it’s too late. “Meadows” friends are on the turned upside down Biffa Bin stage. Celeste...Arlo & Ziggy are on!!! Celeste starts moaning like ET after too many drinks during a Quiet Man convention..Ziggy is kicking a broken wind chime & Arlo is banging his left nut on a burnt out old Tuna can with his woman’s Study’s degree. Just before I leave and go back to my natural resources consuming life, Drinking a Scotch and Back to searching for Tulisa from N-Dubs, “Meadows” informs me it is not about the music and it is about how it make you feel. I feel like Music is about the Music and I have to leave. This Albums makes me feel how you feel reading this about this album about how this Album makes me feel about Music or pretend to like Interstellar

Haunting, unique, groovy. I had never listened properly listened to Portishead beyond their hits (Roads etc.) and this showed me how much I was missing out.

Fucking amazing plug it directly into your soul

Way, WAY better than any other electronic album I've heard on this list. I know Portishead, but was unaware of this album. I really love this album.

I thoroughly enjoyed this album 5/5

Wonderful.

9/10 Favourite: The Rip Least Favourite: None

Portishead is one of the first bands that my now-wife introduced me to when we first started dating. I love the airy weirdness of them and their mixture of traditional instruments with well-integrated electronic music.

This is one of my all-time favorite albums. I listened to it for a year when it came out. It's Portishead's best album even though Dummy was a huge, landmark album. It is always an interesting read about how they put their songs together. The band is a bunch of mad scientists. I love the ending of the album/Threads. It sounds like you're on a foggy shore looking out waiting for Cthulhu arrive any second. Good stuff.

Any excuse to revisit a Portishead album and I’ll take it. I remember being pretty excited when this album came out since I had been waiting for 10 years for a new Portishead album and I was not let down. If you haven’t watched or listened to the live Roseland ballroom performance, check out the closer “Strangers”. Also singer Beth Gibbons’ newest album “Lives Outgrown”made my top albums of the year for 2024 and is definitely worth your time. Anyway this album gets an easy 5 for me as does their other two studio albums.

Maybe I’m just burned out on Dummy and the self-titled album, but I’d take this album over those any day of the week. It has a cold, haunting, almost post apocalyptic sound that really hits me. The album leans heavily into a dark atmosphere, with mechanical, lifeless sounding beats that add to the bleakness. Beth Gibbons’s vocals are absolutely incredible, and I love how well balanced they are with the music. It’s never overpowering, just perfectly woven into the mood.

I have no explanation as to why I've never listened to this before, seeing as 'Dummy' is one of my favourite albums. I can't even say I wasn't aware of it, as I remember liking the flyer single 'Machine Gun' when it came out. All I can say is I was REALLY busy at the time. This is several shades darker than Dummy, more gothic. It's like the difference between Mezzanine and Blue Lines. And it's brilliant.

this is what the cool girls listen to

Probably the best Portishead album. Underrated.

Portishead took 10 years between their last release and this and there's always a fear that a prolonged hiatus would ruin the bands chemistry.... but no, this is a swirling, brooding, bleak, anxiety ridden masterpiece.

My parents were big Portishead fans during the 90's when I was a child, and I remember very well when this album came out and I did a deep dive on the band's discography and became a huge fan as well. We then went to see them live, it was the first show of the tour and also the first 'big' show I went to. All of it a very formative experience for me. I also remember when "Machine Gun" first came out and how abrasive and strange it sounded. This was certainly not the Portishead of the 90's. It's as though the band were dismantling their own sound and building it back up in a jagged and disfigured manner. The whole album is like that, each song introduces different stylistic approaches. This very much differs from the previous records, which worked more like unified mood pieces. Here, we jump from brooding to mysterious to unsettling to calm and back to unsettling in true disorienting fashion. With this album, Portishead showed it was possible for a Trip-Hop act to make vital music long after the genre's time has passed, even though not many others, or even themselves, has followed in the footsteps. Key tracks: Silence Hunter The Rip We Carry On Machine Gun Magic Doors Threads

A new a few songs into this album is was probably going to be a 10. I thought Dummy by Portishead was phenomenal and enjoyed just about every song. But unfortunately as time has gone on its faded into the recesses of my mind without a strong compulsion to return. This was different, Geek the Girl by Lisa Germano is a Masterpiece and one of my favourite albums of all time. This album operates in the same realm and is better in nearly every way, somehow. It feels like the forgotten sound track to a Lynch film, the B-sides to a silent hill sound track. It's original, creative and brilliant. I cannot wait to listen again. 10/10

Loved it!

This is such a classic album. I miss Portishead so much. No skips, all bangers.

Fav artist Portishead at their prime. Too good.

17 år siden den her plade udkom og resten af verden er stadig ikke halet ind på Portishead. Forstår godt de aldrig har udgivet flere, det ville ikke rigtig være fair mod andre musikere!

Never really listened to Portishead. Futuristic, vibey music if you're stoned.

3 is aggressive and subtle in the same breath. Beth Gibbon's voice is so haunting, ethereal, filled with despair and sorrow. So good. It is such a great album The distortion of the album adds to a sense of urgency that there is some unknown terror lurking, waiting. No time to waste, make haste.

Definetly the darkest album.

Portishead may be one of my favorite bands relative to how little they’ve actually done. Maybe that’s their secret weapon, maybe it isn’t. Beth Gibbons seems content these days to relive the past for 3 minutes a night while otherwise jamming out to increasingly elaborate folk rock arrangements, while Geoff Barrow seems content these days to bitch and moan constantly on Twitter. But for a few cosmically perfect moments, they created some truly impossibly perfect music. Dummy and s/t will get the (rightful) credit for defining a singular sound that, perhaps tellingly, no 90s nostalgist has really tried to revive since, but Third may still be my favorite Portishead album: a group so hellbent on doing something new they threw so much sonic spaghetti against the wall and basically all of it stuck. Please listen to “Machine Gun” again, maybe one of the most conceptually insane recordings of our era that should not work but does anyway, and the listen to how it’s followed up by “Small”, which sounds like 90s Portishead reduced to its most simplest terms: a simple guitar figure without any notable effects followed up by what I assume that’s a synth that sounds like a violin before bursting into a 60s keyboard/drums arrangement that sounds like ‘traditional’ Portishead but with the melody all wrong.I could play this game forever. It’s so easy just to describe how unique and wild every arranagement on this album is. But then what’s point? That’s the more interesting part: for all the despondency of the first albums, maybe nobody has ever come together to sound more alone than these three people on this album. Let me revel in the darkness again.

Moody as hell and expertly brings you along with some fun along the way

This may secretly be the best album on this entire list, but I’ll never say that.

I never really listened to Portishead. I knew them from Glory Box which is a tune, but I never felt the need to explore their other work And wow, turns out I've been missing out big time! This was proper experimental, I actually went 'what the heck' out loud at one time. But it's not so experimental that I disengaged (which I tend to do). Lots of stuff going on, plenty of variety. I enjoyed this start to finish.

It's rare an album this experimental is also this listenable. Reminds me of Kid A in ways, but in some ways it's very unique. I was kind of annoyed at a late-career album like this making the list when so many from the 21st century are ignored, but this one is genuinely great.

Loved Beth's voice, the innovative production choices and the atmosphere

It's certainly different from their first two albums. Doesn't have the same trip-hop beat nor as much of the strings / jazz / etc sounds. But it's still awesome. I recall having the same reaction to this album (especially songs like Machine Gun) that I did to Radiohead's Kid A (with songs like Idioteque). Initial reaction is "wait, what's this, what happened to that old sound?" but then I grow to love it.

Wow, missed this first time round. Breathtaking in places.

Wonderful soundtrack vibe, moving away from their trip hop sound

In my opinion this is genuinely one of the greatest albums of all time. The group comes back after a decade of inactivity to create a weirdo art-rock masterpiece with influences from all over the place. Beth's voiced aged into something so haunting and fragile it sounds like it's on the verge of completely breaking, especially on the final track. Part of me still wants them to release another album in the future, but how do you improve on near perfection?

This record is so good. Oddly the love record from New York captures some of the songs better. But this mood is so pronounced.

really not a fan of the whole trip-hop thing so the other portishead album i encountered on this journey really did not do anything for me. i groaned when i got this album because i was expecting the same. boy was i wrong. i really dig this one! it definitely has electronic aspects to it for sure, but what i really love is the dissonant, ethereal feel to this one, mixed with a lot of the indie-retro sound. in a lot of respects, it sounds like it was made in 2008, but a lot of spots on the record, you might think it was made in a different era. one of the highlights for me was how the track 'the rip' built into a cacophony of electronic noise. really cool, really interesting, really glad i listened to this one and gave it a shot!

Very fun mellow jams. Otherworldly sounds

It's hard to catch lightning in a bottle and so I don't expect this to be the same band that released the stellar 'Dummy' album, fourteen years prior to this. However, 'Third' is an album entirely unexpected. Expectedly, Third is cautious to retain the band's original sound, but also intent to show their evolution over elapsed time. Something most bands struggle with. Third is able to effortlessly integrate real instrumentation with the drum machines and sampled bits they're famous for. And the arrangements on Third have become more diverse, complex and sharper than anything on Dummy. Beth Gibbons' voice has become less the haunting echos and more overt Stockholm Syndrome while retaining a feeling of soft-immediacy. Third's expanse of darker themes has grown wider, weirder and unapologetic. Some of these tracks play most of the way through like beautiful performance art pieces only to be awkwardly interrupted without notice, just like you'd expect performance art to be. The album plays closer to a Blonde Redhead album of the same era than a Basement Jaxx or UNKLE album of yesteryear. Third is an album that defies category and shows Portishead is not afraid to change on their own terms and challenge the idea of confined maturity. Though awkward at times and seemingly disjointed on the surface, Third is worth exploring deeper and is an excellent evolution for the band that may overshadow their original release, Dummy.

Livid I hadnt listened to this before. Total masterpiece, and more up my street these days than their Massive Attack buddies. I always assumed they wouldnt be as good, but this is absolutely class. Love how it goes from subtle to mad. Can hear HEALTH / Low / Kim Gordon in a few of these tracks. Then other times they sound nothing like any of them. I’ll be listening to this a lot going forward!

This was a fun time with a lot of wacky sounds, exactly what I want from these guys, a little more beach housy than their earlier work which is very cool

Creepysexycool