The Taste Of Life

Portishead “We Carry On” – Just about two weeks ago, a few minutes into the daily morning meeting at work, I found out that I, along with all of my co-workers, was about to be out of a job. It only took a few seconds to break the news, but the meeting kept going on and on, explaining why it was all happening when all I wanted was to get out of that room and that building as quickly as possible. I needed to process it; I needed to be alone; I needed to freak out. I had to stick around and stew in a silent panic for a few more hours, but sometime around 2 PM, I went home. It was an exceptionally dark and rainy afternoon, almost too perfect for my dreary mood. When I got back to my apartment, I couldn’t do much more than put on the new Portishead album, get in my bed, and attempt to sleep it off.

At that point, I had owned a copy of the Portishead’s Third for a while, but hadn’t really given it much of my time. I was never in the mood for it. I flicked through it a couple times, settled on “Nylon Smile,” and thought “okay, maybe I can do something with that on the site,” and pretty much ignored it for weeks. The choice to put the album on in that moment was somewhat arbitrary — I didn’t actively think “oh, I’d better put on that really bleak Portishead record,” it just happened to be one of the cds sitting in front of the stereo. At any rate, it was just about the most ideal album I could have heard under these specific conditions.

The sound of the record is a reward in and of itself — each song has its own set of specific tones and textures, and many of them are quite odd. Every so often, I’d be pulled out of myself just to notice a particular sound: The clanging horror movie guitar contrasted with the Silver Apples pulse of “We Carry On;” the eerie staccato drum machine hits of “Machine Gun;” the sudden, disquieting horn skronk in “Magic Doors.” The entire album is a paranoid lull, and its sustained feeling of impending doom seems infinite, even when some of the songs end in abrupt silence. It’s ideally suited to moments of doubt and fear, serving to both exacerbate that mood, while also offering a sort of solace, perhaps from a sense of implied solidarity in the face of loss and loneliness. (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)