Further to my Portishead blog last week, a CD turned up this morning, so we've finally been able to hear a couple of tracks that wouldn't work on our secure stream. Quite abrasive on first listen, but I'll report back later. At home this weekend, I returned to the new Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds album for the first time in a fortnight or so. It still sounds great, as you might imagine, and also funnier than ever. The comedy is compounded, I think, by this video to "Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!", which features Cave and his moustache on some kind of treadmill, strutting, gesticulating and generally hamming their way through this excellent song with all the picareque extravagance that the lyrics demand. And while we're loitering on Youtube, have a look at this new clip by Liam Hayes & Plush. Hayes has been around for over a decade now, and has one of the most eccentric careers of anyone I can think of in recent times. He initially appeared playing a bit of piano on records by The Palace Brothers and Royal Trux, before releasing a seven-inch called "Three Quarters Blind Eyes"/"Found A Little Baby" which ranks as one of my favourite singles ever. After another single, Hayes disappeared back to Chicago, promising a magnum pop opus that, if the singles were anything to go by, may well have sat somewhere between Big Star and Bacharach. When he did return, however, it was with a stark album of piano ballads called "More You Becomes You". Around that time I interviewed him in a Putney park: my first question was something vague about his age which took him ten minutes to not answer. After that, the interview got odder. Hayes then appeared briefly in the movie of "High Fidelity", playing piano in a cocktail bar, and was reputedly working on his own film. Eventually, a few years ago, the great full-blown album appeared, "Fed". Since it had cost him so much to make, only a Japanese label could afford to release it. Drag City, meanwhile, ended up releasing the stripped-back, substantially cheaper (I assume) demos as "Underfed". It's all good. As is this new song, "Take A Chance". With characteristic logic, Hayes appears to have finished another album, and still not found a record label to release it. In the interim, he's made a video for this impressively lavish song - mostly looking like a TV clip from the late '60s - which promises plenty. I always thought that Hayes was a reinterpreter of laidback, Bacharach-ish chamber pop in the same way that Will Oldham lovingly subverted country-pop. The thing is, Hayes' career thus far has suggested that his approach to the music business is so wilfully perverse (even by the standards of that Chicago set), he makes Oldham look like, oh, James Blunt or something. I wonder when the album will actually turn up?

Before I start, a couple of caveats. First, I must admit that I haven’t played either of the first two Portishead albums for a shamefully long time, so I’m going to be struggling a little to put “Third” into context. Second, we’ve been listening to “Third” on a fairly capricious secure stream, which seems to skip a couple of tracks and be a little unpredictable; consequently, if I get titles wrong and can’t give a complete picture of the album, apologies in advance. What I can hear, though, sounds really great. “Silence” is playing now, a rumbling, urgent opener, with some intricate rhythms and those trademark banshee, Bernard Herrman-ish strings. Beth Gibbons doesn’t turn up for two minutes, and the extended hiatus (that wonderful album with Rustin Man notwithstanding) doesn’t appear to have made her any less neurotic in approach. My rough hearing suggests she’s singing, “Wounded and afraid inside my head, falling through changes”, though by “Nylon Smile” she appears to note I “struggle with myself, hoping that I might change a little”. While her bandmates have subtly adjusted their sound, Gibbons remains reassuringly anguished, and it’s a pleasure to hear a British female singer grapple with an idea of soul – whatever that is – which is so distinctly different from the stage school gymnastics of all those post-Winehouses currently packed onto the radio. It’s funny, listening to Gibbons, to remember how Portishead were rapidly stereotyped as some kind of coffee table cliché, the dinner party CD of choice and so on. Again, I can’t remember exactly how discomforting those old albums were – I always suspect that the band were cursed by those who followed after them, so that when we try and recall how Portishead sounded, we sometimes summon up, I don’t know, Morcheeba by accident. But there’s some pretty edgy things on “Third”, very much to my taste. The rattling, clangorous “We Carry On” is especially terrific. I remember seeing some mention of The Silver Apples in a review of their All Tomorrow’s Parties show, and that’s definitely apparent in the cranky early electronica here, in the rapid martial drums. Great scything riff that cuts through all the static and friction, too. It rocks, unapologetically. “The Rip” is possibly even better, beginning as a folkish trinket that carries the same bucolic doom as Gibbons’ “Out Of Season”, but has a gentle pattering motorik beat that reminds me of both Neu! and even recent Radiohead – perhaps because it’s eventually coupled with some gorgeous electronic textures redolent of Boards Of Canada. I think this is my favourite right now. As I write, “Plastichead” is playing, and I suspect this is closest to those two old records. After eight or nine listens, though, I’m starting to spot the intensity of the detailing: what initially appears quite sparse and bleak, now starts to betray the epic time that the trio have evidently spent obsessing over every last detail. “Magic Doors” is similar, but it’s interesting again how the old vinyl crackle, the overt samples, have been replaced with a frictional, complex net of aged keyboards, and how the breaks are so eccentric. “Magic Doors”, incidentally, has a wonderfully inhospitable free jazz trumpet solo, I think, but it’s so treated and strange, it’s hard to work out exactly what it is. “Deep Water”, meanwhile, is a tiny ukulele sketch, with Gibbons and some ghostly, eccentric backing vocals that make it seem at once whimsical and threatening. And “Just Like Me” reminds me, for some reason, of PJ Harvey, maybe circa “Is This Desire?” I always liked Portishead, but in the initial trip-hop wars, I was always keener on Tricky. By some weird coincidence, Tricky is also making a comeback this spring, though one that’s much less anticipated after his past decade or so of such uneven and disappointing material. One of the great things about “Third” is that it doesn’t sound like Portishead have been wasting their time away. There are no huge rethinks of how music can sound, but there is a sense of how a captivating formula can be refined and discreetly expanded, and how every detail, every grind and hiss, can be shaped so exquisitely. It’s a fascinating record; let me dig out those first two records and see if I can make some more useful connections.