In his April 28, 2008 review of Portishead’s third album, the aptly-titled Third, Ernest Thompson wrote in Treble, “The album comes to a close with ‘Threads,’ a song that conveys such evil, especially with Gibbons’ closing warblings and the threatening bellows at the end, you think you might be in a Dario Argento film, about to be attacked from behind. The last few seconds of ‘Threads’ are the most frightening thing I’ve heard on record since the Cure’s ‘Subway Song.’”
I don’t recall the first time I heard Third, but I know I was genuinely excited about it. Portishead — Beth Gibbons, Adrian Utley, and Geoff Barrow — is not a prolific band. Their first album, Dummy, was released in 1994; their second, the eponymous Portishead, in 1997. Third didn’t arrive for another eleven years. Accordingly, it reflects a mature band reaching out, expanding its sound, layering new styles on top of their spooky, trip-hop instrumentation.
No song on Third had a greater impact on me than “Threads.”
But let’s take a step back. I have a short and not particularly remarkable history of being terrified by songs upon first listen. As a child of eight or nine, I was alone in a my basement the first time I heard “Revolution #9” from The Beatles (1968). This was clearly not the band of “Love Me Do,” “Please Please Me,” or “I Want to Hold Your Hand” — that much I knew — but it was also not the band of “Flying,” “Tomorrow Never Knows,” or “You Know My Name (Look Up the Number).” “Revolution #9” (not to be confused with “Revolution #1,” also on the White Album) was pure experimentation, a psychedelic, avant garde sound collage that vexed my young ears and forced me to consider that there was more to this band than hits. Also, what did it mean? How did this thing even make it onto the album? Were the Beatles so powerful at the time that they could throw a eight-minute and twenty-two second bouillabaisse of tape loops, found sound, and John & Yoko warbling into the middle of what would turn out to be their most-lauded record, and no one batted an eyelash? As I sat listening to it, I was more than a little freaked: it was crazy, scary, strange stuff.
(And let’s not get started on the whole “Turn me on, dead man” Paul is dead clue when you play “R #9” backwards. This thing is scary enough played forwards.)
The second song that rendered me immobile through its sheer weirdness was Pink Floyd’s 23-minute “Echoes,” which I first heard while lying in bed (alone) at my then-girlfriend’s parents’ house in Duxbury, Massachusetts. I had just bought the album whose entire second side “Echoes” occupies, Meddle (1971), that afternoon in Harvard Square, and was eager to explore it. I had enjoyed Floyd’s longer-form suites, like “Careful With That Axe, Eugene” and “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun,” but “Echoes” was on another level entirely. Like other prog rock leviathans of its time, it was separated into sections, movements, with sonic themes ebbing and flowing throughout. As it would during the Dark Side of the Moon sessions, the band made full use of synthesizers, sometimes to disconcerting effect (listen for the “wind” to start blowing around 11:15, and Dave Gilmour’s guitar to emit what sounds like cries of pain).
The song’s haunting, almost Lovecraftian lyrics hint at a society indifferent to suffering, on the verge of collapse:
Overhead the albatross
Hangs motionless upon the air
And deep beneath the rolling waves
In labyrinths of coral caves
The echo of a distant time
Comes willowing across the sand
And everything is green and submarine
And no one showed us to the land
And no one knows the where’s or why’s
But something stirs and something tries
And starts to climb toward the light
Strangers passing in the street
By chance, two separate glances meet
And I am you and what I see is me
And do I take you by the hand
And lead you through the land
And help me understand the best I can?
And no one calls us to move on
And no one forces down our eyes
No one speaks and no one tries
No one flies around the sun
Cloudless everyday
You fall upon my waking eyes
Inviting and inciting me to rise
And through the window in the wall
Come streaming in on sunlight wings
A million bright ambassadors of morning
And no one sings me lullabies
And no one makes me close my eyes
So I throw the windows wide
And call to you across the sky
So what is “Echoes” about? Because the band chose an empty Roman colosseum for the site of its 1972 concert film (see below), and because of those telltale guitar cries (for help?), “Echoes” had to be, I surmised, about the destruction of Pompeii. Arun Starkey, writing in Far Out, seemed to concur, describing the song in relation to the film: “Directed by Adrian Maben, the film helped cement the song’s titanic status, augmented by his montage of shots taken in the surrounding area. In the grandiose ancient Roman Amphitheatre, performing under the sweltering Italian sun backed by their stacked amplifiers, it is as if the band had chosen this setting specifically to converse with someone in outer space via the song’s other-worldly medium. Were they calling for humanity’s aid?”
Of the song’s transporting power, Starkey wrote: “As soon as the song starts, you begin to be slowly entranced. Typical of Pink Floyd, the listener is guided through a realm that is almost not of the conscious. It is akin to being transported through time and space, with gravity sweeping and swelling around you.”
Cosmic horror, anyone?
As it turns out, the meaning of “Echoes” is, well, kind of pedestrian. It’s Floyd exploring a theme that would become commonplace in its music — the inability of humans to connect, though we share a common heritage: to wit, “I am you and what I see is me.” But unlike what was to come on Dark Side, Wish You Were Here, and Animals, “Echoes” represents a band searching for a sound, and willing to push any button to find it. I mean, what group hoping for commercial success opens an album with a song whose sole lyric is “One of these days, I’m going to cut you into little pieces”?
As for “Threads,” I have yet to suss out the meaning (I’m pretty sure it’s unrelated to the film of the same name, about the aftermath of a nuclear strike), but that hasn’t made it any less potent. Beth Gibbons’ voice is at its shaky, ethereal best, and the backing track is pure menace. The lyrics speak of an individual at war with her mind, seemingly on the verge of ending it all:
Better, if I could find
The words to say
Whenever I take a choice
It turns away
I’m worn
Tired of my mind
I’m worn out
Thinking of why
I’m always so unsure
I battle my thoughts
I find, I can’t explain
I’ve traveled so far
But somehow feel the same
I’m worn, tired of my mind
I’m worn out, thinking of why
I’m always so unsure!
I’m always so unsure!
I’m worn, tired of my mind
I’m worn out, thinking of why
I’m always so unsure!
I’m always so unsure!
I’m always so unsure!
I’m always so unsure!
I’m always so unsure!
I’m always so unsure!
When, where, will I sleep
Why am I not in all I got?
I can’t find no one to blame
Stand, stand, damned one
Damned one!
Damned one!
Damned one!
I am one!
Damned!
One!
Where do I go?
By the song’s end, the lyrics and Gibbons’ ululating vocals have faded away, replaced by a hellishly bent guitar note that belches out ten times during the final minute of the track. The note sounds, then fades, then returns. In between, silence, questions. How long will they stretch this out? How long will we be caught in this cycle of terror and menace? Even now, when I hear the song, I’m never quite clear when it will end. I’m always so unsure.
Side note: Geoff Barrow, it turns out, is a master of the disquieting sound loop, as evidenced by his score (with Ben Salisbury) of Alex Garland’s 2018 film Annihilation. [SPOILER] In a scene towards the end, when Natalie Portman’s biologist character Lena awakes in a lighthouse, she finds a alien version of herself, and the two begin mimicking each other’s movements, with four unnerving notes underscoring the sequence. Annihilation by itself is a terrifying film, but thanks to Barrow and Salisbury, this sequence (and others like it, in Garland’s Men, Devs, and Ex Machina) becomes something new and otherworldly.
So… is it horror?
I’ll never be able to summon the feeling I had when I first heard “Revolution #9,” “Echoes,” or “Threads,” but that doesn’t make the songs any less powerful today. Music is just as capable of upsetting and discomfiting as prose, film, and theater. So while the intention of these songs may not be to horrify, the music proves that the answer is Yes. I challenge anyone to sit in a dark room, as I did, listen to these songs for the first time, and not be disturbed in some way. In each case, the musicians were aware of the tools they had in front of them. They knew those tools had the ability to unsettle, to produce strange, discordant sounds. They know, full well, their songs would scare the shit out of the listener.