Third

Yet another glum, one note album from Portishead. I'll give 'em one thing: They really do know their audience. But is the third time a charm? For me, it kind of was! This is a big improvement over Dummy for me personally, which I found cool for the first few songs before disinterest and boredom eventually set in. Not every album is made for every person. Some people love songs that have like one sentence repeated 50 times with a repetitive, unchanging beat placed behind it. I'm just not that guy.

For whatever reason, the soundscape on this album was more to my liking even though I still found the album extremely uneven from song to song. I'm just not a fan of a lot of Portishead's, uh, choices.

My biggest complaint is Beth Gibbons' overall vocal performance. While she sounds lovely at certain times, at others she's annoying, affected, strained and / or off-key, which is her intentional artistic "interpretation" of the lyrics. That's fine, but it doesn't mean I have to enjoy listening to all of it. On top of that, there were times where she made me unintentionally burst into laughter during otherwise serious songs. She quivers like a billy goat during an earthquake on several tracks and, on "Deep Water," she sounds like an irritating, precocious child trying to impress mummy and daddy.

My second issue is that even though I did enjoy a number of the song compositions, there are other times where they definitely overdid the repetition of weird, abrasive noises (most obviously on "We Carry On"), which was about as pleasant to listen to as an alarm clock going off.