Portishead Better with Age

If Portishead’s new album comes off as cheesy, it’s only because it’s easily digestible, Sasha Frere-Jones writes in the New Yorker. While the album, Third, is “delightfully abrasive,” the Brits have “accepted that being soothing, despite their perverse streak, is part of what they do,” crafting tracks that will appeal to “young Radiohead fans” and “those who like some heft in their gloom.”

The trio’s languid music has indeed been co-opted by the dinner-party set, but Third “sounds like nothing else on offer now.” How a generation unfamiliar with Portishead’s 1990s catalog will receive the group in 2008 remains to be seen, but it’s “music by people starting from scratch and for people who want to utterly pulverize boredom. And, eventually, eat.” (More Portishead stories.)