VINIL Universal Records Portishead: Third

The Guardian: Torpor fosters distemper. That's what the decade-long gestation of Portishead's Third album suggests from the moment it kicks in. The smoothness of old is supplanted by surface noise on opening track, 'Silence'. Those familiar open guitar chords descend into something more menacing - the only constant, the spidery vocal of Beth Gibbons, still obsessively pacing around her pained and private world.

The fluidity of Portishead's music was always something of an illusion. Rather, it was painstakingly constructed with a maddening precision. That tensile quality is even more evident on Third. Edgy, wary, snarling and dissonant, the music mirrors the morbidity of Beth Gibbon's lyrics, accentuating the unsettling quality of a voice that is closer to the hysteric tones of Sixties free jazz innovator Patty Waters than any conventional pop vocal. Beset by an almost primal sense of insecurity, you get the feeling Gibbons is capable of mining misery from bliss. She even admits as much in the opening lines of 'Nylon Smile': 'I'd like to laugh at what you said but I just can't find a smile.'

The album's first single, 'Machine Gun' takes Portishead's minimalist aesthetic to extremes yet still manages to sound epic, pitting Gibbons's haunted vocal against a metallic beat. There are moments of lightness, but the prevailing mood is of a group who have succumbed to a riptide of dour emotion. Never has a pit of despair sounded so inviting."