Beth Gibbons has a brilliant, extraordinary voice.

This does *not* mean "she sounds nice when she sings"; "she has the 'voice of an angel'", or "she'd do a mean aria".

It means: she sings, and you listen. She sings, and she communicates. In my view, she has one of the most distinctive, affecting, expressive voices in modern music. (What a horrible phrase - "modern music".) Listening to her sing after any number of 'cool', 'trendy' vocalists, there really is (for me) a sunlight-breaking-through-clouds sensation. A fascinatingly three-dimensional voice, heavy with real, complex, organic emotion. Not a trace of artifice or empty posturing.

What do you do with a voice like that? If you're Geoff Barrow and Adrian Utley (the other two members of Portishead), you throw it into relief. I've always found Portishead compelling because of the brilliantly-managed contrast between vocals and arrangements/instrumentation/production. And on 'Third', the contrast is starker than ever: listening to these songs might put one in mind of an exotic bird, enclosed in a stainless steel cage. Even on the more analogue, retro-tinged numbers, there is a pervading iciness and detachment to the arrangements. When, on previous records, beats and samples may've been infused with the warmth of vinyl, on 'Third', they're stripped to their raw essentials. The uncompromisingly mechanistic rhythms of 'Machine Gun' exemplify this quality at its most extreme - but even the more 'rounded', woody instrumentation of songs such as Nylon Smile sounds filtered, cold -- desaturated. As if bathed in fluorescent laboratory lighting. Sounds may be treated with copious delay - but they reverberate in bleak, unfurnished spaces: cold, hard ...

Read the full review on my MOG page (http://mog.com/cogwheeldogs/blog_post/160080)