Album. Of. The. Year.
Okay, that's a bit hyperbolic but the claim is based largely on the fact that this band took ten years off and came back with a record that very easily could have just been another Portishead album that relied on the sound they're already known for. Nope. That's not what they did at all. While a return to the Portishead sound of old would have been welcomed with open arms, that just wasn't in the cards for Geoff Barrow, Adrian Utley and Beth Gibbons. I'm sure the fact that "trip-hop" the genre they helped lay the blueprint for has long since died had something to with the direction the band has taken the P'head sound.
What Portishead did was simply intentionally destroy the "Portishead sound." Obliterate it. If you thought Dummy and Portishead were melancholy affairs then Third is flat out apocalyptic. This album is ugly, it's nasty, it's unpleasant, it's uneven. It's a jarring slap in the face from a band absolutely DARING you to play this in the coffee shop you may work in. (Which is EXACTLY what I'm going to do!) This is NOT background music. This is the soundtrack to the end of our days, and it absolutely rocks.
