Spooky Perfection.(Portishead's album, Third)(Sound recording review)

In an interview with the London Observer several months ago, Geoff Barrow, the leader of the British trio Portishead, complained, "They turned our songs into a fondue set." "They" could be anyone--critics, fans, or the commercial concerns that have tried to license the band's music for film or TV. But Portishead brought the cheese bath on itself--when your sound is languid and spacious, and your female singer is generally not a screamer, your albums are going to become hotel-lobby music, even if they're brilliant. When the band released its startlingly complete debut, "Dummy," in 1994, it encountered a crisis common among delicate musicians: success and failure both feel like slights. Fans loved the band, but did they get it? Did people hear more than just dinner music? Portishead's new album, "Third," which is actually its fourth, sounds like nothing else on offer now, but that won't prevent people from playing it in the background and breaking out the long forks. No matter. "Third" is at times delightfully abrasive, but the band members seem to have accepted that being soothing, despite their perverse streak, is part of what they do--even if the music, upon closer inspection, isn't reassuring.

Barrow is from the town of Portishead, twelve miles west of Bristol, where he met the guitarist Adrian Utley and the singer Beth Gibbons in the early nineties. He was in his twenties, and his musical skills were mostly non-traditional: mastery of turntables and samplers. He guided Utley and Gibbons into an aesthetic that was more appealing than their record company expected: sepulchral music that sounded like a warm, thick reduction of hip-hop, flecked with samples of soundtracks and dominated by the heady cry of a female singer who sometimes became so unhinged that it seemed as if the music itself were scaring her. "Nobody loves me," she wailed over and over in "Sour Times," the song that made Portishead famous. The band succeeded as miserabilists with high production values and a knack for the gorgeous and the odd--the booming, plangent bass and the sophisticated lady singer.

For their second, self-titled album, released three years later, the band members upended what had made them Portishead. They abandoned sampling almost entirely and engaged in obsessive strategies like writing and recording instrumental passages, pressing the results to vinyl, distressing the disk, and then sampling this edition of one. Meanwhile, Gibbons reduced the dram of playfulness in her vocals--almost always written separately from the tracks that Barrow and Utley created--and came across less like a complex, lovelorn woman than like an insomniac lighthouse keeper with a wonky stereo. (All that womb-like bass? Gone!)

What was best about the second record was the third record, a live album recorded in 1997 and 1998. Here's a band led by a guy who plays turntables, whose recordings are a patchwork of machines and instruments playing parts that are rarely notated and are then mixed to resonate like dance records--how do you reproduce all of this using an orchestral string section, horns, and a rock band? "Roseland NYC Live" is a sucker punch, and the band had such confidence in it that a DVD was also released. This might be its best album. The performance integrates many instruments, amplified in dissimilar ways, with no feedback. (Did these guys have the longest sound check in history?) Songs, some of which bear no resemblance to their recorded versions, move cleanly among passages of near-silence, little bursts of scratching or electric guitar, and swells of orchestral oomph. Beth Gibbons, who almost never gives interviews, is comfortable

onstage and goes through a little flip book of vocal styles in a rearrangement of "Sour Times," including a flirty imitation of Billie Holiday and a rapid, harsh vibrato that could be described as a banshee wail if that term hadn't been wasted on lesser singers. Every time I hear the record, I'm ...