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The Evangelist

 * don't lose this one

AMC

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Gaby Wood

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Third (Portishead album)
Third contains ten tracks with a total running time of 49 minutes which was described as "a psychedelic rock album" by Nate Patrin of Pitchfork Media. Other critics noted that the album was more guitar driven than their previous albums, while Geoff Barrow stated that "it's our most electronic record as well, though." Many critics noted a progression of the band's sound, saying that while the focal point remained Gibbons distinctive voice which anchored the album in familiar territory, musically the band had moved away from the trip-hop sound they had become known for and into more experimental music.


 * dis "much of Third sounds like the soundtrack to a genuinely chilling sci-fi horror film." "The sound throughout is muffled and dark, cinematic still, but differently." "only the crackling, noir-ish strings one might expect of Portishead are replaced by shuddering, unsettling electronic echoes."
 * Guardian "Propulsive Krautrock rhythms and German radio samples conjure up Eastern bloc minimalism ... while soft, organic textures add depth to the icy shallows elsewhere."
 * NME "Within, auld English folk music sits next to the vintage Dr Who electronics of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, hip-hop-derived drum breaks loosed from the turntable and rolling off towards the distant horizon."

mix of styles

 * NME "Third’ is a restless sort of spirit, an album that jostles through styles with knuckles white." "Portishead bond strange sounds together with real emotional force, learning to make sense of madness."
 * Popmatters "their most obviously diverse effort."

vocals

 * Slant "Gibbons's value and input shouldn't be dismissed outright, as the singer's Out of Season functions as a missing link between Portishead and Third"
 * Slant "Gibbons's lyrics amount to little more than detailing how she can't find the words to express her manic depression, and her vocals are less prominent,"

individual tracks

 * remember deep water do-wop
 * popmatters "“Deep Water” immediately sticks out. All there is to it is a ukulele, the always-sorrowful voice of Beth Gibbons, and a little bit of barbershop backup vocalizing."
 * Rolling stone ""We Carry On" is a smashingly claustrophobic two-note electro riff, with heavy echoes ofthe Silver Apples' "Oscillations." In highlights like "The Rip," "Small"and "Machine Gun," Portishead mix up dub, break beats, cathedral organ,Moroccan drones and even surf rock into a headphone album for sourtimes"
 * NME "‘Silence’ commences with a snatch of speech in Brazilian Portuguese and jitters forth on clanking, Krautrock-like rhythms and keening violins – all of which pause to herald the arrival of Beth, who sweeps in like Death him/herself: “Wounded and afraid inside my head”, she croaks, “Falling through changes”. Immediately following is ‘Hunter’, an echoing dreamscape of twinkling percussion, bobbing Tropicalia and gnarled guitar fuzz from the dark side of Walt Disney’s imagination. ‘The Rip’, meanwhile, blurs history with alchemical results: a spare piece of ukulele folk that, midway through, slowly lifts off on a glowing keyboard line, Beth’s voice left pirouetting on a single note." "‘We Carry On’, a deranged, Clinic-like stomp – thanks to a shared reference point in the shape of ’60s electronic pioneers Silver Apples – sits next to ‘Deep Water’, a cute interlude with backing vocals supplied by a choir of puffy corpses roused from their watery grave. " "it embraces abrasion and discord almost by reflex, with the intention to jar or grate: take lead-off single ‘Machine Gun’, with its mechanical drum motifs, like the opening beat of New Order’s ‘Blue Monday’ bashed out on scrap metal and wreathed in strange electricity; or ‘Magic Doors’, one of the record’s most anthemic numbers, apparently sabotaged by a gloriously wrong interruption in the shape of a parping, jazzy saxophone."
 * P4K "There's a brief acoustic folk song ("Deep Water"), an abrasive and jittery electro-industrial number ("Machine Gun"), free jazz horns ("Magic Doors"), analog freakouts from the United States of America-fueled early days of electronic psych ("The Rip"), and a song that sounds a bit like Clinic's droning, rhythmically dense garage-kraut, except somehow spookier ("We Carry On")."

Psychocandy
Neither of them wanted to be the singer so they tossed a coin and Jim lost.

The men who always performed drunk recorded Psychocandy entirely sober: “Lots of tea and Wimpy, not speed and alcohol,” says Hart. The apparent chaos was in fact meticulously choreographed: they sampled white noise and feedback and carefully punched it into the mix. Getting the sound exactly right is why the album, recorded at north London’s Southern Studios with engineer John Loder, took six weeks.

Finding kindred spirits in the provincial surroundings of East Kilbride was to prove problematic and it wasn’t until the appearance of bassist Douglas Hart that things began to take shape. Four years younger than Jim Reid, Hart shared the same taste in pop culture as the Reid brothers and despite a lack of musical proficiency, the trio soon bonded to form the nucleus of the Mary Chain.

“I used to hand around with Jim and we kind of started a band,” recalls Hart. “William was around and had his own songs but they were living in a fucking tiny bedroom and fighting all the time. So me and Jim did this thing where we did two of Jim’s songs but at this stage not much was happening.”

music

 * allmusic "all cranked up to ten and beyond, along with plenty of echo. " + "anti-pop yet pure pop at the same time" +"What the Reids sing about -- entirely interchangeable combinations regarding girls, sex, drugs, speed, and boredom in more or less equal measure -- is nothing compared to the perfectly disaffected way those sentiments are delivered. Bobby Gillespie's "hit the drums and then hit them again" style makes Moe Tucker seem like Neil Peart, but arguably in terms of sheer economy he doesn't need to do any more."
 * BBC "set forth their stall of proto-shoegazing." + "Sheets of feedback over inept tribalism and sweetened by doleful, yet amazingly sweet vocals" + "their innate love of classic 60s pop and psychedelia as much as the Stooges"
 * DiS "here was a band not afraid to fuse melody with obnoxious bursts of white noise." + "all the distortion and feedback" + "
 * p4k "intuitively-- the JAMC wrote pop songs, basic three-chord rock’n’roll and all-hook melodies, . Only...as played by lazy, spiteful, nearly hopeless people who didn’t care one way or the other and therefore covered the whole thing in screeching." + "thin, trebly, and drowned in indistinct reverb" + "The music stumbles its way from stoned, lazy beauty (“Just Like Honey”) to speed-freak noise (“Never Understand”) to almost-bouncy pop (“Taste of Cindy”)"
 * RS "the veneer is gritty and inedible, the next layer is hard and crunchy, the core is soft and chewy." + "For all its chain-saw screech and übermetallic badness, the Jesus and Mary Chain is a pop band with doo-doo-doos and la-la-las, simple melodies and full echoing production around Jim Reid's laconic Lou Reed-like monotone. William Reid's guitar parts blast shards of maniacal feedback" + "holocaustic guitar squall"
 * observer "beautifully wasted pop" + "melody and noise, beauty and violence, love and hate."

LCD

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