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Remember trip hop? The downtempo, ambient, jazz, funk and soul infused music the kids were going crazy for back in 1994? A style of music that’s sorely missed today. Don’t fret, little ones – the masters of the genre are back!

Portishead will finally (FINALLY!) release their 3rd album titled (cleverly enough) Third on April 14 in the UK.

As posted on their blog yesterday, the album will be composed of 11 tracks and is 49 minutes and 13 seconds long.

This is an album that was much talked about in the last decade or so. Will they be reuniting or not? False album titles were spread around over the years (one being Aliens) – their rumoured third album was quickly becoming the Chinese Democracy of the trip hop world.

But they finally reconvened last year and worked on this new opus.

Last December at the ATP festival (which they chose the band lineup for) they featured 5 new songs in their live set (check out YouTube for the songs) and I must say they’ve still got it. Some of it’s more on the electro side than trip hop but it’s nice that they’re evolving since they’ve pretty much mastered the trip hop sound.

At this point, they would be copying themselves.

They’ll be back on the road starting a small tour of Europe at the end of March and they’ll be part of the just announced lineup of this year’s edition of the Coachella music festival. I happened to have seen them live on their 1998 tour and to this day, it’s still one of my all time favorite shows.

Links:
Official Site: Portishead
MySpace: Portishead

P.S.: Two other well known trip hop acts will be releasing albums this
year. Morcheeba and their new album titled Dive Deep in February and Weather Underground, another long-in-the-works album from Massive Attack. Cross your fingers for this one to actually see the light of day in 2008.

Posted on Thursday, January 24th, 2008 at 11:57 am by Mike VK and is filed under Music & Videos.

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