Third

Eleven tracks in about forty-nine minutes, and the subtractive test mostly fails to find a cut. Silence must open: its spoken Portuguese introduction, its pounding drums and its end cut off mid-phrase announce a record that will not let a song finish. The Rip is required as the one place the old tenderness is let in and then turned to machinery; Deep Water, ninety seconds of ukulele and close harmony, is required as the breath between the two most punishing tracks. Machine Gun and Threads are the spine. The test bites twice: Magic Doors restates the record’s mode without a turn of its own, and Small’s long organ middle extends a mood more than it advances one.

Score: 8.5 / 10

What the record brings into the open can be stated: a self that has lost the means of trust, in love, in others, in its own worth and in faith, finds the world around it mechanical, repetitive and indifferent, and goes on anyway. We Carry On names the going on; Threads ends on doubt, not resolution. The sound discloses as fully as the words. The voice, fragile and unadorned, is set against drum machines and abrasive guitars that do not accommodate it, so that the condition is undergone in the hearing, not described. What holds the axis below the bar is the line between mood and meaning: the words are private and fragmentary, and little is stated beyond the self’s exhaustion and distrust.

Score: 8.1 / 10

Elevation is frequent, almost all of it dreadful, and some of it very high. The Rip is the warmest height: a fingerpicked guitar under the voice, then the same figure passing into an analogue synthesiser as the drums enter, a lift that is also a loss. Machine Gun is the harshest: a drum machine like gunfire, the voice exposed above it, and a closing synthesiser passage of cold grandeur. We Carry On holds a motorik pulse for six minutes until it becomes a trance of dread. Threads ends at the record’s heaviest, the voice at its rawest. Height comes on six or seven of eleven tracks; Nylon Smile, Plastic and Magic Doors stay level, and the temperature is mostly one.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Myth is evoked, and in one respect carried by the sequence. The record opens on a voice speaking in Portuguese of a rule of three, on a record named Third; the hunter, the deep water, the magic doors and the threads, the thread of a life that the Fates spin, are old figures summoned by title and atmosphere. Under the sequence lies a descent, from a voice cut off in Silence, down through the machinery of the middle, to Threads, where the voice is at its lowest and rawest; the order of the tracks builds it, and every placing is heard as a step down. What holds the axis is that no figure bears it: there is no person in the record but the voice.

Score: 7.7 / 10

The inheritance is the band’s own: the trip hop of Dummy (1994) and Portishead (1997), slow breakbeats, scratched samples, a torch singer over noir strings, a sound so widely imitated that by the end of the 1990s it had become a coffee-table style. The turn is large. After eleven years the band gave up almost every mark of it: sampled breakbeats for played and programmed drums of motorik and industrial cast, cinematic warmth for abrasive guitars and analogue synthesisers, the song’s arc for abrupt cuts. A returning band of large audience offered a record its audience had not asked for. What holds it short of the bar is the path: its languages were proven, and Kid A had made this kind of swerve first.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Change the form and much of what the record knows goes. A record about a self that cannot be consoled is built so that nothing consoles: songs cut off before they close, forms that refuse a chorus’s return, a pulse that does not vary in We Carry On and Machine Gun, and a voice placed alone against machinery that does not adjust to it. The Rip enacts the argument inside one track: the human figure on a guitar is taken over by the synthesiser, and the song grows more beautiful as it grows less human. The sequence is counted here, once: it carries the descent. Nylon Smile, Plastic and Magic Doors serve the form without enacting it, and the sequence intensifies more than it turns.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Eighteen years is a short span, and on this axis it forecasts more than it demonstrates. What it shows runs mostly among musicians and critics: the record is placed high whenever its decade is counted, and its drum and synthesiser sound has been studied and borrowed. The yield in the recording is formal and real. The layered textures separate on return, the play between played and programmed sound repays close hearing, and the descent of the sequence is felt more on a second hearing than on a first. The semantic return is thinner: the words are few, private and fragmentary, and part of what a listener finds in them on return is projection invited by the voice.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The field is the popular and electronic album of the 2000s, and the place in it of a returning band of the 1990s. The intrinsic force is real: the record showed that a band with a defined and widely copied sound could dismantle it and rebuild from harsher, older materials, krautrock pulse, analogue synthesiser and post-punk abrasion, without losing its singer’s centre. It reorganised the band’s own possibility more than the field’s. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record was well received and widely heard, and its drum and synthesiser sound has been studied and borrowed; but no body of later work can be named that it redirected, and the revival of its languages ran through other hands in the same years.

Score: 7.9 / 10

Survival is weighed over eighteen years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued, in print on vinyl and CD and in streaming. Presence is continuous but not wide: the record is heard as an album by those who know the band and placed in the lists of its decade, but it has nothing like the broadcast and public presence of Dummy, and no track has passed into common circulation. The fabric is little fixed to 2008. The record avoided the production fashions of its year, and the analogue palette it chose was already old, so it dates less than most records of its decade. The narrowness of its presence is what holds the figure.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The making is load-bearing throughout. Beth Gibbons’s voice is among the most exact instruments of its time: pitch held at the edge of breaking, vibrato used as distress, the register thinning or hardening by design. Adrian Utley’s guitar runs from the fingerpicking of The Rip to the scouring of Hunter and Silence. Geoff Barrow’s drums and programming make rhythm the record’s argument, and the production keeps a harsh record legible: the voice is never buried, and each analogue tone is placed so it can be followed. The faults fall on a share of the record: Magic Doors and Nylon Smile are thinner in arrangement, Small’s middle runs past what its material carries, and the abrasion is sometimes laid on rather than shaped.

Score: 8.7 / 10

One law governs the record: a lone, exposed voice set against a world of machines that will not adapt to it. The two most distant elements obey it. Deep Water, ninety seconds of ukulele and close harmony in the barbershop manner, is the lightest thing on the record; Machine Gun, which follows it, is the hardest. The first is the human figure at its smallest and most domestic, the second the same voice under fire, and the placing of the one against the other is the law made audible. The range is wide: krautrock pulse, folk guitar, close harmony, organ psychedelia, industrial drum machine, synthesiser score. The law strains once, at Small, whose organ middle drifts toward a 1960s psychedelia the rest does not share.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held fully: distrust, exhaustion, self-doubt and the will to go on. The couple is present as loss and need through most of the words. Faith is glimpsed as something lost, and the sacred appears only as an old rule spoken in a foreign language at the start. Technology is the medium itself, set against the voice. The family, labour, the state, history, place and the natural order are absent, except as figures in the titles. One consciousness joins what is there and holds it whole. What holds the figure lowest is the narrowness of the field: nothing beyond that self enters except as a sound.

Score: 7.1 / 10