Portishead: Third, Sims 2 , Steamworks char!

I got my limited edition boxed set of Portishead's new album, Third, yesterday.

My god, it's *gorgeous*. I mean... it's everything I was hoping it'd be and yet it's surprised me a lot. I mean, it's Portishead, without a doubt. The whole album has their mark on it. But it's got a different feel to it from their previous two albums. I think it's particularly the percussionist(s?) they started using, it gives something of a primal feel to the songs. Yet it's still electronic, primarily, or at least acoustic put through electronic filters.

So it's this mix of primal and modern... timeless, somehow, and with Beth Gibbons' haunting vocals floating over it all. It's just... beautiful. I mean, this is THE album of the year for me. I waited 11 years to hear what Barrows, Utley and Gibbons could come up with musically and creatively, and I am NOT disappointed.

I've been playing this album... over... and oooover... on repeat. Going to learn every one of the vocals if I can!

Besides that, I've mostly been sitting here poking at Sims 2. I've had it running all day and my computer shows no signs of straining, much less actually running OUT of memory. Yay, go Saboteur. XD I can leave the Sims 2 window alone for hours and when I pop it back up it's working smoothly. Just... wow. Now that I can sit and enjoy it, the $1k or so I popped for this new computer was SO WORTH it.

Oh, right, and I'm coming up with my character for Kalli's Steamworks, *finally*. I even gave him a name. Carlyon Penrose Harvey, a Cornishman who moves to London for university and starts a travel and shipping agency (Penrose Transportation). His great-uncle, John Harvey, started Harvey and Co. -- a foundry and engineering works company. He is distantly related by marriage to Richard Trevithick, the inventor of the steam engine, who married John Harvey's daughter Jane. So he grew up affluent, and always close to the transportation industry in some way. Since he had less of a head for engineering and physics than his father, he decided he'd concentrate on transportation as a business, rather than the construction of the engines that make that business possible.

Steamworks is a LJ RP, so I actually went and made Carlyon's journal. My first LJ RP... odd! I took quite a while to find a decent picture for him, too -- not at all used to taking pics from celebrity photos. The smiling userpic is Keith Urban (a singer from New Zealand, I believe) and the intense one in shadow is Casey Skinner (who is a model/actor, apparently... I didn't really like the pic at first, but decided it could be appropriate for some entries, and doesn't look unsimilar to the one I chose as the default.) The other two I snagged, I believe, are from Monet paintings.

Oh and here's Carlyon's full bio (which I typed up somewhere between starting and finishing this entry), on his profile page. Kinda wish Kalli didn't have to go to sleep, so I could show her already... :O

Anyway, now I get to go back to messing with Sims 2 for the (late, late) night. XD And swooning over Third some more... can't even count how many times I've heard the album by now!