New Portishead Album Makes Rob Almost Shit Pants; Meanwhile, Parents Scramble for Pottytraining Alibi

So I finally got around to picking up the new Portishead album this week. I was actually going into Sound Scape to get the new Bonny Prince Billy; well, no. I was actually going in because I was in the Blue Tusk (Syracuse's Armory Square) and they started playing Vampire Weekend, a band that's like fun as shit to drink to. Well, I get these urges when I haven't bought an album in a while, it's like an urge for a cigarette. Yeah, I don't really need it, but hey, my life sucks so what the hell does it matter. Okay, a bit of an exaggeration, but I mean, unless you're in love with every chromosome in your body or every penny in your pocket, than what's the big deal to take a drag or fish out a few dimes for a new record to spin. (not literally a record, because I left my Technic in New Jersey.)

Anyway, let's take it from the top: the new Portishead album "Third" deserves to be heard in its entirety with the same devotion that people give certain tv shows. They sit, maybe turn the lights out, pay deep attention, and curse distraction. Better, with music you can get in bed, pull the covers over your head, and get freaked out by the possessed deathly nuclear-aftermath that defines Portishead's new album. This stuff sounds like the back-up band for Cormac McCarthy's the Road. Shit, what happened to these people to make them freak out enough to pursue such devestation. Everything on the album is about death, the confusion, the disorentation brought on by lack of air. Things crumble, seeming to want to revert to normal song structures, but things just eventually end, as though the band had lost hope in making something more stable.

Please forgive me if I sound excited, but I actually had a strange experience the other night in bed. The song Horses was playing, which contains this three string guitar, what sounds like a ukulele in fact. Anyway, there was a point where I realized what the lyrics were saying and how she was saying it, like with this bleak strength that had grown out of such murk and ashes to grow into this benign hope - fantastical, absurd - yet it lives on, and the song follows it into this strange lift that runs its course and then doesn't have anywhere else to go, and expires as naturally as milk gone bad.

What happened at this moment was I got that tingle in my spine, goosebumps, but it didn't just end, it grew into something that swept through my whole body, up my to my brain, like those little balls in the movie Twister that get swept up into the tornado. I could visualize it in my body. And it was the music, and it was my submission to that power with no self-conscious attitude or restraint. I want only something new to be born inside me, I guess an openness to new experience, to people, places, no divisions. To accept things, and quietly accept the thing that I can't accept.

Late blogging has left me sleepy.