What made Portishead a prominent band in the triphop period (between Massive Attack’s Blue Lines and Alpha’s Come From Heaven) was its successful blending of the new, (modern hiphop) with the mature (jazz cinema; the post-rock of 4AD). Each of these parts was brought into the mixture by one of the band’s three members. With Beth Gibbons came Bauhaus, Cocteau Twins, Throwing Muses; With Adrian Utley, the jazz of Elevator to the Gallows, The Samurai, Taxi Driver; With Geoff Barrow, the beats of Prince Paul, DJ Premier, RZA. When the trio began working on it’s second record, Portishead, Barrow’s was in his early 20s, Gibbons in her early 30s, and Utley was heading to his 40s. Portishead was the meeting point of three generations (waves) of music—its base in the present, hiphop, and its melodies and moods drawn from the near and distant past. Dummy and Portishead are defined by this order (hiphop, cinematic jazz, late-rock); the new record, Third, is not. What’s gone is the hiphop, the base of the earlier recordings. Gibbons brought to the new album her sorrows, suicidal loneliness, gothic longings, Utley brought his cinematic and after-hours textures, but Barrow brought almost nothing. He seems to have junked his turntables and MPC2000 and not bothered to replace them with something else, something different, something that’s happening right now on the streets of London and New York. And a lot is happening these days—dubstep, grime, new variations on hiphop (Jay Dee, Timbaland, Just Blaze). The beats on Third are not its foundation. You almost don’t notice them. What commands your attention is Gibbon’s pain and Utley’s soundtrack to that pain.