In a lot of ways, this latest Roly Porter release sounds like a sister album to Paul Jebanasam’s Continuum, which is not all that surprising given that Jebanasam and Porter co-run Subtext Recordings (along with Emptyset’s James Ginsburg).  Like Continuum, Third Law is an ambitious, forward-thinking, and viscerally produced monster of an album.  Unlike Jebanasam, however, Porter completely leaves both Earth and conventional composition far behind in favor of complex, futuristic abstraction.  It is a unique aesthetic to say the least, veering unpredictably from warmly stuttering electronics to rib-cage rattling percussion flourishes to sci-fi choral music to absolute planet-smashing intensity with the all the restraint that one normally associates with mad geniuses.  While Porter's bold, speaker-shredding, and universe-spanning vision could be said to lack a healthy amount of restraint, no one will ever say that he lacks an incredibly rigorous attention to detail.  That combination yields quite an unusual result, as Third Law sounds like what I imagine you would get if you typed "create epoch-defining masterwork" into a supercomputer.
I have spent a large portion of my life chasing, hearing, and obsessing over unusual music, but Third Law is unexpectedly one of the most confounding albums that I have ever tried to wrap my head around.  That situation is doubly weird because this is not even the first Roly Porter album that I have heard, though I probably just did not pay close enough attention to the other ones.  The issue is this: Third Law sounds like an album that was literally made in the future.  Or in a future, as in "possibly not ours."  Porter is working at a level of complexity and immensity so far beyond that of everyone else that it just seems futile and wrong-headed to try judge his work by current standards.  For example, while other musicians were spending 2015 sitting around trying to think of cool melodies or beats, Porter was busy dreaming up something that sounds like all the damned souls in hell raising their voices in chorus as the world is ripped apart by a black hole (the opening "4101").  If he was not making music, it is easy to imagine Porter filling his time with something akin to designing and building the Death Star in his garage.
The question that I am wrestling with is whether or not that makes Third Law a great album.  The best analogy that I can come up with is that hearing Third Law in 2016 would probably be a lot like seeing a Pink Floyd laser light tribute show in the late 1950s: regardless of its merits (or lack thereof), most people would definitely walk away from that gig thinking that Think Pink or Shine On was a hell of a lot better than an old-timey snooze like John Coltrane.  That said, of course, Porter has a considerably more vision and originality than any mere time-traveling Pink Floyd tribute band.  Conversely, however, Third Law lacks a lot of the characteristics that music normally needs to be loved and/or memorable, such as strong recurring motifs or expected song structures.  My guess is that Porter cast such concerns aside as regressive, but this album occupies a weird grey area between structure and abstraction that makes their absence noticable.  To compensate, Porter instead offers up something more like a series of dazzling set pieces, such as the "bouncing ball" bass hits in "Mass;" the alternating beautiful, skipping synth loops and crushing industrial rhythms of "In Flight;" and the lushly gorgeous melodies he unleashes during the crescendo of "Departure Stage."  Actually, now that I have tossed out the phrase "set pieces," it occurs to me that Third Law is probably best judged entirely by film standards, despite having absolutely no visual component.
Viewed in that light, Third Law can best be described as a wildly audacious sci-fi epic that unrelentingly blasted me out of my seat for 90 minutes, after which I stumbled out of the theater feeling like I lived an entire second lifetime.  And if anyone asked me what I thought of the film, I would only be able to describe it as "intense."  Several days later, however, after my over-excited synapses had a chance to calm back down and process things, I would start to think about the film more critically and realize that I completely did not remember entire sections of it and that it did not elicit any real emotions deeper than just pure awe.  And that maybe the whole thing a bit too conspicuously overwrought for my taste.  Of course, "pure awe" is still quite wonderful.  Also, my analogy is a slight oversimplification: Third Law is much more than just mere spectacle, as there are plenty of great moments strewn all over the place and they follow a very coherent and dynamically satisfying arc.  And, of course, this album is an absolute tour de force of sound design.  What I will remember is mostly just the spectacle though, as most of Third Law’s other traits are hopelessly eclipsed by its sheer immensity and power.
 
 
Read More
