Portishead: Third (2LP, 180g, gatefold, UK import) [POLYDOR UK]

Why you'll love it

This UK import spreads Third across two 180g LPs in a gatefold jacket. It was Portishead's first album in eleven years, went top ten in several countries and was certified gold in the UK.

This edition

• 2LP set
• 180g vinyl
• Gatefold jacket
• UK import
• Download card included
• Stereo mix

About the album

Eleven years is a long time to make people wait, and Portishead spent part of it not making music at all. Geoff Barrow moved to Australia, he and Adrian Utley scrapped one batch of ideas after another, and what finally got them going again was producing an album for The Coral and watching a younger band write a soundtrack in an afternoon.

Back in Bristol with Beth Gibbons, they deliberately avoided the sounds that made Dummy famous. In came krautrock, John Carpenter film scores and a cupboard of analogue synths, from a Minimoog and an ARP 2600 to a clavioline. "Silence" opens with a spoken intro in Portuguese and echoes that refuse to stay in time, "Machine Gun" is built on a drum machine that sounds like exactly that, "The Rip" blooms from a fragile acoustic figure, and "Threads" closes with Gibbons on guitar and a detuned synth howling like a ship's horn. Barrow wrote "Magic Doors" back in 2003, the song that convinced them to carry on.

NME later named it one of the 500 greatest albums of all time. Three albums in seventeen years is a rate of work we in retail would quite like to try, though to be fair, theirs are rather better than our window displays.

Also at Kops: more Portishead on vinyl · browse Electronic

Tracklist

Listen

On Island / Mercury (cat# 4797612), a reissue of the 2008 album.