Portishead - Live on Later...With Jools Holland, 15 April 2008

Beth Gibbons, Portishead, "Later...With Jools Holland"

Jesus. 10 years since the last Portishead release. 13 years since their last full-length. Geoff Barrow and Adrian Utley are making soundtracks and guesting on other folks' records. I can only imagine what Beth Gibbons is up to; I hope it's something involving her, some folk songs, and an English cliffside. The magic, the mystery of how and when they make music. There's very little like it in this world.

Listening to a Portishead record for me is a bit like reading a Bible is to others. Seeing them live is church. It's a worship of sound, a spiritual experience unlike few others I've had. I'd see them anywhere, but I feel like the best would be to see them in a deconsecrated space, to keep with the metaphor. Give a holy sound a proper venue.

"Third" came out April 2008. I remember it being a really odd time, an odd sense of doom and hope permeating the air. The first single from Portishead in 10 years, "Machine Gun", had debuted a couple months ahead of the full-length; I think it was one of the last times I went to Pitchfork for any music news. It sounded like the end of world to me. I couldn't wait for the whole deal.

I wouldn't get "Third" right away, but I was more than satisfied by the group performing live on "Later...With Jools Holland" the week the new record came out. They played two cuts: "The Rip" and "We Carry On". Some soul during the heyday of music blogs kindly ripped both performances to MP3 for me; I share them here. These are, by far, my favorite versions of each song. "The Rip" sounds even more ethereal, Barrow's drums so thin and ghostly. "We Carry On"...it's a song that makes me want to run through walls, its motorik beat, slapped against metal, and Silver Apples-style keyboards offset by guitar that plinks and then EXPLODES! I can't hear it without imagining a music video, directed preferably by Ben Wheatly, of medieval soldiers, muddy from head to toe, fighting and dying.

There should be a new Portishead record in 2021, is what I'm saying.

Click here to download.