Portishead — Third

While drunk, I apparently once loudly declared that Beth Gibbons sang like a witch. I'm feeling pretty vindicated about that observation right now, because if ever there was a soundtrack to boiling snake eyeballs and casting hexes on people, Third would be it. Portishead's return from 11 years in the wilderness mostly eschews the gloomy spaghetti western trip-hop that made them for an album that's entirely more ruthlessly evil. Strange off-kilter rhythms are married to menacing keyboard squelches and Gibbons' particular caterwauling to create something that feels both pure and purposefully uncompromising. Sure, there are some contemporary touchstones, including Radiohead's sonic palettes, the Liars, darker Ladytron and whoever Bjork hires to make her tracks, I guess. But the dense and consistently sinister tone that runs from the Apache helicopter assault of "Plastic" into the industrial stomper "Machine Gun" and through to the last track, the headphone-shaking electromagnetically pulsing "Threads" is so way beyond and below whatever else is out there that it's enough to make black metalheads give up church burnings 'cause they know they've been beat. This is truly one of the darkest sounding records in decades.

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