thirty years ago on a cold january night my grandfather went out to start the snowblower, most likely a cigarette dangling from his lips, and suffered a fatal heart attack.  i remember when my mother got the call and went pale and still.  we were in atlanta, then, i think.  back to new jersey we went for the funeral.  i was 5 going on 6.  at the viewing, i wore a dress she had sewn for me, long sleeves, blue floral, a matching fabric pouch made from the leftover fabric, a blue ribbon tied in the hair that is forever falling in my face.  i remember trying to find places to hide, familiar faces, there were so many in attendance…the ambulance corps he headed, the local police come to pay their respects, so many uniforms amidst the friends and family spread among the floors of the home.  we wore the customary torn black ribbons pinned to us, keriah, symbolic of the loss of the loved one and the mourners’ anger with god for taking him.  my mother didn’t let me go with them to the gravesite to say goodbye.  she thought i was too young.

i didn’t see much of my grandparents when i was little; we were always moving somewhere, farther and farther away.  but when my parents separated my mother and i moved back in with them and i spent the most time with him i ever would.  intuitively, i was drawn to him, the quiet, intelligent, wry man, who found excuses for excursions and got us both out of the house.  his home, my mother’s childhood home.  they still had the antique stores in those years, my grandfather and his brothers, and we two early risers would make our getaway to the diner, stopping first for pink hostess sno-balls and candy cigarettes for me, the paper for him. at the diner counter he would smoke and drink coffee and i would spin back and forth quietly next to him on my stool.  then i would go to the store with him, watch him open and go about his tasks, sit with a book and read, walk around and look at the antiques, ask about things.  i think the ride in the car was always my favorite part.  at night after my bath he would spread a towel over his legs, untangle and smooth out my hair as he dried it.  someone doing this today will still, unfailingly, calm and put me to sleep.

thirty years he has been dead and thirty years it took me to finish circling back to my first hideaway.  thirty years of stolen rides and long hair in my face and torn ribbons and sneaking sweets and life on the lam. thirty years it took for me to move to new york city, to come home to the place of my first adventure.  for my grandfather, sanford kahn, the first to hold my hand and lead me here, to teach me to take the time and space to learn who i am, to bring me to the place i love more than anywhere else in the world and have made my home. for my grandfather.

If you believe people do whatever they can get away with, you might imagine his portraits of people peering out windows or sprawled on beds to be portraits of lust and false-heartedness. Manhattan’s geography generates infidelity: ours is a capacious city, a vast island whose size permits isolation and therefore betrayal.

Davidson’s photographs remind us that people’s personal lives are mostly tedious. Everybody has dirty plates and families. Privacy protects us. Behind closed doors we shine our shoes and our personalities; we rest and then resume playing the roles of interesting people. We hide our worst selves, and our dullest: we would rather have people see us as bad than boring.”  Elizabeth Gumport, writing for this recording

i ain’t scared of the fall…i’ve felt the ground before

hell yes

“As radical reinventions go, Third is surprisingly natural. You can credit Gibbons as the familiarizing factor: She possesses a voice that seems impossible to shackle to just one musical setting, even if it already sounds perfectly at home in brooding downtempo ambience. As the most recognizable component of the group, she has the most established stylistic tendencies– subtle quivers, an ability to go from hushed to piercing without laboring over the transition, an aching timbre that expresses anxious vulnerability better than nearly any other singer– and she slips back into them comfortably when she needs to.

But it’s also a style that works in more contexts than we’ve previously heard, something she hinted at with Rustin Man on 2002′s folk and jazz-influenced Out of Season, and Third is the culmination of this. Pitted against the jarring mechanical stop-starts of first single “Machine Gun” or the chase-scene-paced opener “Silence”, Gibbons sounds like both a defiant accuser and someone clinging on for dear life. Quieter numbers, like the slow-build electronic ballad “The Rip” or the softer moments of the cabaret highwire act “Hunter”, highlight the fragility in her voice. And since almost every song on Third addresses some sort of emotional or mental helplessness– typically a deep and profound sense of loss and isolation– it’s almost as though this shift in sonic identity is there to mask the fact that this is an incredibly bleak record lyrically. Gibbons’ wounded tone can take commonplace-on-paper sentiments (“I’d like to laugh at what you said but I just can’t find a smile”; “I can’t deny what I’ve become/ I’m just emotionally undone”) and give them a kind of pathos that’s almost uncomfortably voyeuristic to listen to.

As for how the music itself has changed, long story short: Third is a psychedelic rock album. It opens with a rhythm that’s nearly twice as fast as almost everything else Portishead have done, the percussion on most of the songs is frequently muffled or buried under layers of noise and sometimes just stops short of being non-existent (though it’s heavy and propulsive when it does make itself known), and their keyboards and strings have graduated from relaxed tension into dissonant rumbles and shrieks. 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”). Portishead as you previously knew them are represented, barely, by the last song on the album– the sleepwalk-paced, David Axelrod-esque “Threads”– and even then, its intermittently fuzzed-out tension-and-release dynamic would’ve made it one of the harshest-sounding songs on Dummy or Portishead.

You could say that this would be unrecognizable as a Portishead album without Gibbons’ voice, and you’d be sort of right; guitarist and contributing songwriter Adrian Utley mentioned in a recent New York Times article that one of the rules they set for Third was that they couldn’t fall back on any instruments– or even any trademark sounds– that they’d used on previous albums. But their style here isn’t particularly out of character, comparatively experimental as it is; Utley’s guitar still twangs sharply when it’s not doing things like interjecting “Iron Man” growls in “Hunter” or splintering into Syd Barrett-isms at the coda of “Small”, and the melodic identity that he and Geoff Barrow built on a foundation of minor keys and sinister grandeur still holds sway. In the terms of a group that was frequently lumped in with film composers as much as Bristol axis peers, Portishead’s Euro-cool John Barry intrigue has been pushed into the disquieting territory of John Carpenter’s compositions and Bernard Herrmann’s Alfred Hitchcock scores.” from nate patrin’s review for pitchfork