Massive Attack - The Wild Bunch of Bristol

Bristol is a town stretched along the northeastern coast of Somerset, at the mouth of a broad inlet that shapes, to the north, the small and haughty Welsh bulge, and to the south, a long peninsula running down into the green fields of Cornwall. A city with an important maritime and industrial past that has never harboured ambitions of worldly metropolis, and has instead always worn its working class, lower-middle-class pride with quiet modesty. And yet it has spat out no shortage of musical raids (the name of the Pop Group alone is enough to make you blanch), always keeping its good-natured, disinterested manner, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

Towards the end of the Eighties, Bristol was swept by underground movements heading in the most disparate directions: there was new wave as the alternative current with the largest following, the reggae and soul of what was by then the second generation of African and Caribbean immigrants (tied to Bristol since the horrors of the slave trade), hip-hop and dj-culture ready to become a trend-phenomenon beyond the independent circuits, and electronic music as a genre on the rise within the more erudite artistic circles.

What can happen, in the end, when all of this is condensed into a single, incandescent sonic agglomerate? The answer is called Wild Bunch.

It's still 1983 when two young dj's of Afro-Caribbean origin, Andrew Vowles and Grant Marshall, self-styled respectively "Mushroom" and "Daddy G", give birth to a sound system that tours the city improvising events involving musicians, mc's, dj's and artists of the most varied backgrounds, which will be given the name "wild bunch". It's an open collective through which numerous other important names will pass: two years later Nellee Hooper joins, who will later leave to devote himself to his own project Soul II Soul and to a successful career as a pop producer, Shara Nelson, a collaborator of Dub Syndicate and Missing Brazilians, reinvented as a black-pop singer with a one-of-a-kind voice, that hothead Adrian Thaws, future Tricky, and above all a very young Robert Del Naja, known as "3D", a sort of street artist with a "habit" for graffiti and tapes, himself the son of immigrants - his parents are two Italians devoted to the cult of Maradona and Napoli Calcio.

A triumph of mixed-race culture, then, that over time becomes a genuine city-wide phenomenon, culminating in 1987 in a series of live shows that draw crowds of almost biblical proportions, more than any club in the city was able to hold at the time. At least according to a widespread legend.

At the same time, the collective seemed to have settled into a kind of three-headed monster led by 3D, Mushroom and Daddy G. The eccentric pseudonym Wild Bunch, among other things, was becoming increasingly obsolete and inadequate to define a musical identity that had by then gone well beyond the mere divertissement of three suburban dj whippersnappers. Thus was born the idea of a new, programmatic moniker: Massive Attack.

The first track they recorded, "Any Love", is a sunny, unpretentious funk-pop number sung by soul vocalist Tony Brian, while their actual debut EP, released on Circa in 1990, was Daydreaming, a track in which the wild rapped back-and-forth between Tricky, 3D and Daddy G alternates with Shara Nelson's dreamy choruses. The single was well received in the alternative underground, while making headlines for other reasons: it was the height of the Gulf War, and for a while the group was forced to drop its brazen name and appear at gigs and in record shops simply as Massive.

"Blue Lines" and "Protection": inventing a new pop philosophy

Just a few months later, after signing a major deal with Virgin, it was time for their debut LP. The album that went to press as Blue Lines was still essentially the work of an expanded collective, boasting the support and guest contributions of Horace Andy, the legendary voice of Jamaican reggae with whom they began a long and fruitful collaboration, as well as Shara Nelson, Tony Brian and Tricky.

Blue Lines opens with one of the most subversive and symbolic statements of intent that the Nineties would produce. "Safe From Harm" advances proud and resolute like a tank, Shara Nelson's free, powerful vocal prophesying the new path ahead, diaphanous synths wrapping our prophetess in a mystical aura, the doom-laden bass obliterating the battered remnants of a decade of pop music.

It's an entirely new formula: under close scrutiny, you can trace in its genetic makeup every quality of Black music in all its forms (hip-hop, soul, rap), but reshaped by electronic textures and the long, mocking grooves of a churned-up dub sound, a direct descendant of the experiments of fellow countrymen Mark Stewart, Lincoln Scott and Adrian Sherwood. A track that remains a genuine cornerstone in the transition toward a genre that didn't yet have a name, but was already unmistakable to anyone's ear.

The remaining eight tracks on the record hold firm to the tone set by the opener, stringing together a series of masterfully crafted urban concoctions: the "smoky" dub track thick with samples from "One Love"; the relaxed hip-hop of the title track (it was already inventing downtempo as we now understand the term, though no one noticed at the time); and also the irresistible soul-pop gem "Lately", which launches a formula that would prove hugely successful in pop music for years to come, and above all the moving single "Unfinished Sympathy", in which, clad in a black tunic and with piercing gaze, the prophetess Nelson reappears, wandering among the lost mortals amid compressed scratches and a relentless, cinematically dramatic orchestral crescendo.

"Five Man Army", finally, thanks to its stripped-down nature, lets us dissect this infectious and utterly singular sonic material: four jokers indulge in rapping with a loose, easy flow over an essential, slowed-down hip-hop rhythmic groove that reveals the electronic textures beneath and the boosted basslines, a noble legacy of Sly & The Family Stone and a certain strain of disco music, with "fifth member" Horace Andy bringing up the rear with his dose of exalted, pitch-black religious ecstasy, reggae to the bone.

The risk of it coming off as a half-baked, overreaching gimmick couldn't have been greater. Instead, everything works like a charm, with surprising naturalness. There's heart in the melodies, there's ingenuity in the flawless collages, and above all, as people used to say, "the songs are there".

Precisely because of its hybrid, mixed-breed essence, a style not yet classifiable, Blue Lines would win over listeners across the board, winning over DJ culture, hip-hop audiences and respected mainstream figures like Madonna alike. But it was above all within "alternative" pop-rock circles that the ideas behind Blue Lines would find fertile ground, giving rise to a new way of conceiving dance electronica (or rather, non-dance electronica) that would deeply mark the entire musical decade with what would later be labeled trip-hop.

Three years went by during which the name Massive Attack was on everyone's lips, between heavy-rotation videos and particularly successful remixes ("Manchild" by Neneh Cherry), plus a significant stint in the capital, where, through Nellee Hooper, they crossed paths with many of the biggest names of the moment on the Britpop scene: Blur, Oasis, Inxs, even Naomi Campbell, whom Hooper suggested to the trio as a vocalist for their new record ("a deeply embarrassing situation", as Del Naja would later reveal).

It's in this context, then, that their hugely anticipated second album arrived in 1994.

Protection picks up right where Blue Lines left off, not to retread the same ground, but to chart new paths along the way, almost unwittingly finding itself on shores far removed from its starting point. The heart of Protection beats inside a warm, welcoming cocoon, wrapped in a fine, cold, courteous haze that evokes a European metropolis on damp autumn evenings.

This time it's the beautiful voice of Tracey Thorn playing host, on the opening track and new single by the now-expanded trio: "Protection" is a song that immediately strikes the imagination, both for its qualities, which we might call "empathic", and for the string of purely musical echoes it sets off. It's one of those rare moments as a music listener when you might feel understood, complicit in the song you're hearing, welcomed with a caress as if returning home to an old friend ready to tell you about the world, and to listen to you tell it, without judgment. Languid, nerve-soothing beats and a circling piano line frame the scene, offering exactly the sense of unconditional protection suggested by the title.

But "Protection" is also the track that officially ushers in the golden age of Bristol trip-hop, the moment when the British music press coined the hugely successful term identifying the "Bristol sound", pairing the term with images of rainy, nocturnal cityscapes and a pervasive mood of sullen, inward unease.

A cliché certainly fuelled by Michel Gondry's memorable videos (for "Protection" he shows us scenes of weary end-of-day life in a city apartment block), but also by the concurrent Portishead-style debut, "Dummy". Another instant classic, then, in the Massive Attack story, a track that would nonetheless remain a one-off in their discography, even within the context of the album itself.

Although not straying too far from the blueprint laid out by the title track, Protection is actually vibrant, dynamic material, drawing on elements scooped from the techno melting pot and the nascent idm scene ("Spying Glass" and "Three" are nothing less than brilliant examples of dub-techno applied to the pop song form), yet it's already looking elsewhere: just listen to the hit single "Karmacoma", an impenetrable dub mantra thick with murky visions straight out of Argento-esque horror and Maghrebi dirges (a track that would be re-recorded some time later with Raiz of Almamegretta), or "Sly", with its noir gait threading between the elegant orchestral arrangements of Craig Armstrong and the disquieting vocalizing of Nicolette Suwoton (who had previously penned the forgotten electro-pop gem "Now Is Early"), right up to the inhalations of the instrumental "Heat Miser", which form an unsettling backdrop to the "three-way game" between Daddy G's beats, Armstrong's piano and Rob Merril's drums. The murky visions of Mezzanine are already lurking around the corner.

Protection is still a huge success both in independent circles and in more commercial ones, following an enviable "dual track" that at the time was second only to Björk's in combining "alternative" credentials with sales figures with plenty of zeros.

Massive Attack also become, and above all, the most sought-after "brand" for the fad of the moment: the remix. Aided by the dub "mad professor" Neil Fraser, the trio would go on to remix themselves on the 1995 compilation No Protection, which reworks several tracks from Protection in a psych-dub key (well worth hearing are the versions of "Better Things" and "Sly").

Descent into the dark-wave nightmare: "Mezzanine" and "100th Window"

Over the following three years trip-hop has by now hit the headlines, with the release of Tricky's "Maxinquaye" and a slew of other works vaguely affiliated with the genre. Massive Attack, for their part, row against the chill out trends into which the genre seems to be dissolving, and produce one of the darkest, most oppressive records of the decade.

"We really wanted to focus on depth and perspective. It's an album that gives you the sense of a journey, and it can be listened to on various levels of engagement: if you keep the volume up, it hits you immediately; if you turn it down, it becomes more unpredictable", explained 3D, who, not entirely satisfied with the outcome of Protection, intended to reclaim his punk and reggae background. But, as we'll see, with the new album they would go well beyond all that.

In 1997, in fact, as foreshadowed by Portishead's second album, the dark-wave bug has returned to torment the youth of Albion, settling in among the basslines and samples of Bristol's most creative minds and hands. Having discreetly slipped out the front door, echoes of 4AD (Bauhaus and This Mortal Coil above all) and Suicide creep back in through the trio's psychological windows, offering the three further tools to interpret the gloom and anxiety of the turn of the century.

Besides the trusty Horace Andy, the star who shines brightest on Mezzanine is, not by chance, Elizabeth Fraser of the Cocteau Twins, the cult dream-pop band that defined a decade which, until shortly before, had still been so reviled — confirming the more or less conscious tribute to new wave that the record seems to represent.

Fraser's vocals, as ever ethereal and evocative, are the rare flashes of light glimpsed amid the dark sonic labyrinths woven by the trio, gracing four tracks and ascending to near-divine heights on the unforgettable single "Teardrop", destined to remain the undisputed masterpiece of this sort of "dream-dub": over a minimal rhythm track, akin to a heartbeat, and a celestial guitar arpeggio, Liz Fraser's angelic voice soars, as limpid as a promise of salvation and redemption. The synthesis of dub sonorities and dark atmospheres reaches perfection here, carrying the listener into a dimension suspended between dream and sensory reality. The track would become a huge hit also thanks to its unsettling video, in which the melody is "sung" by the image of a fetus in its mother's placenta — an idea born out of Fraser's impending motherhood, as she lent her lips to the incredible photomontage over the image of the baby. As if to say: a milestone within the milestone.

Mezzanine opens with another memorable intro, the existential depression of "Angel": a rumbling bassline and a dull, suspicious beat that detonates midway into a wall of sound of guitars and effects, while Andy's seemingly innocuous lyrics (“You are my angel/ come from way above/ To bring me love/ I love you”) reveal their grotesque, menacing potential.

We then move through the expressionist anguish of "Risingson", from the Middle Eastern bad trip of "Inertia Creeps" to the gothic mood of "Man Next Door" (sampling "10:15 Saturday Night" by The Cure), on to the hushed ballad "Black Milk" — another tour de force for Fraser's vocals — and the oppressive rap of the title track. "Group Four" is another stroke of genius from 3D and co. and a world-class performance from the Cocteau Twins' voice: melancholic and dreamlike in the first half, unsettling and disfigured in the second, as a chaos of guitars and percussion rises up behind her. A goddess who enchants, deceives and torments. It brings to mind the blonde oneiric apparition of "Eraserhead", Lynchian visions resurfacing esoterically alongside the rehabilitation of that gothic sound to which they seem indissolubly bound.

Mezzanine is dominated by a sense of (para)noia and urban alienation, echoed in sounds that swing between narcotic hallucinations and moments of trance, all heightened by an obsessive use of rap and a sensual rhythmic carpet that makes a constant of that marriage between beats and acoustic percussion first tested on Protection.

Massive Attack manage to definitively shake off the misconception that trip-hop was relaxation music or cocktail-party fare, turning it instead into the vehicle for a dark metropolitan tension and putting it forward for typically rock spaces. A record deeply of its time in the way it reworks quotations, memories, scraps of musical past into a synthesis as chaotic as it is vital, mirroring a society that had by now become just as Babel-like and omnivorous, defined by what former collaborator Tricky would call "Pre-Millennium Tension".

Confirming its potential as a "rock opera", Mezzanine achieves enormous success precisely in those circles (on top of sales that keep climbing), taking the trio onto rock festival stages across half the world.

But the Mezzanine tour also marks the end of Massive Attack as a trio: after a long string of tensions and disagreements over the artistic direction to take, Mushroom leaves the group, which from then on would be built around just 3D and Daddy G.

When 100th Window comes out in 2003, Massive Attack show up in the sole person of Robert Del Naja (Marshall being busy with a new arrival at home), resulting in a de facto one-man band in which 3D's "white" component reigns unchallenged.

The "hundredth window" of the title refers to computer terminology, the operating-system window that can never be closed: "It's a metaphor for the heart and the emotions, there's no point in crushing or locking away a memory or a part of yourself, you'll always have the key to reopen it," confesses 3D, who nonetheless thinks of the album above all as a reflection on man and technology. The artwork, a glass sculpture caught in the act of exploding, hints at the cold, morbid and vaguely unsettling atmosphere running through the grooves of the record.

100th Window, co-produced by Neil Davidge, continues the "mood" set out on Mezzanine, pushing its most psychedelic and nocturnal side even further. The typically rock elements appear smoothed down, the guitars drenched in effects until they become drones, while beneath the surface a seductive electro-dub pulse creeps along.

"Future Proof" moves somewhere between an electroencephalogram and an acoustic signal from a laptop, with 3D's voice in a hypnotic state amid the expressionless glow of liquid crystals and cigarette smoke. The following tracks bring in the album's other two voices: the resurrected Sinead O'Connor – an unlikely representative of rastafarianism – on the celestial "What Your Soul Sings", and the already familiar Horace Andy on "Everywhen".

The mood grows more anguished on "Special Cases", with O'Connor magnificent and almost unrecognizable as she sings of insecurity and unease in social relationships, while a string arrangement sketches sinister, Eastern-tinged patterns behind her. Everything in the refined video then comes together to paint a "Brave New World" kind of scenario.

On "A Prayer For England", by contrast, we recognize the O'Connor of old, who raises the stakes lyrically too – an invocation to Jah to intercede on behalf of England's unfortunate children. Del Naja, though, still manages to land one last great blow, returning to the mic for "Antistar": once again a track that looks to the East, even more so thanks to the closing string crescendo, sealing the record with a masterpiece.

100th Window is the worthy successor to the dark omens of Mezzanine, a mirror of Western civilization, made up of individuals each isolated in their own bubble-web of binary code and LEDs. At the same time, the conflict in Iraq breaks out, which 3D opposes with an actual campaign on his blog and by using footage of the war among the visuals projected during the album's triumphant promotional tour.

The muddled soundtrack to Danny The Dog, Luc Besson's 2004 film, leaves fans of Massive Attack's dark, magnetic sound a little cold, though. Twenty-one instrumental pieces written, arranged and produced by 3D and Neil Davidge. Guitars, samples, electric piano, strings, piano, and once again echoes of King Crimson running through a compelling track like "One Thought At A Time". Dub surfaces wrapped in mysterious sensuality and jazzy colors on "Polaroid Girl", while the romantic, ecstatic highlight comes with the brief "Sweet Is Good", followed by the Mancunian-flavored (New Order meeting the Stone Roses?) "Montage" (New Order and Stone Roses).

Sealing their prestigious career, now spanning more than fifteen years, 2006 brings the anthology Collected, carried by the gorgeous unreleased track "Live With Me", featuring the vocals of Terry Callier.

Sinister liturgies for the 2000s: "Heligoland" and beyond

After a long silence, broken only by a contribution to the soundtrack of the film "Gomorra" (the track "Herculaneum") and a collaboration with Mos Def ("I Against I"), in 2009 the Massive Attack name returns to the spotlight with the EP Splitting The Atom. Four tracks confirming the duo are in great shape: "Splitting The Atom" surprises with a sturdy beat that flirts with the dancefloor, if not for the grim lyrics delivered by Daddy G (back on vocals for the first time since Mezzanine) and the icy synths that swallow everything up at the close. "Psyche" is another coup for the outfit, featuring Tricky's longtime partner-in-crime Martina Topley-Bird, whose feline voice stretches over a genuinely electronic, muffled and sensual soundscape. Four tracks that offer a tasty preview of the proper full-length return the following year.

The seven years between 100th Window and Heligoland (2010) are all keenly felt: Massive Attack have reached a further stage of artistic evolution, looking ahead, far ahead, but also back, reclaiming the pop-electronic formula coined on Protection. Heligoland is a world of frozen emotions, of brief, fleeting melodic openings where what dominates is always a sense of emptiness and decay.

"Pray For Rain", featuring the voice of Tunde Adebimpe, captures this mood well, moving along listlessly like an empty, unheard prayer, split in half by a brief, bright and positive melody that offers a momentary respite from the gloom. Martina Topley-Bird is the album's second guest, already announced on the previous year's EP, and she will also join the band for the promotional tour, where she'll be handed the tough task of reinterpreting "Teardrop". Her contributions to Heligoland, though, are limited to a new version of "Psyche" – more anxious and cerebral, with tightly knit arpeggios – and to the labyrinthine "Babel".

The album seems to lean once again on the warm acoustic arrangements left outside the digital doors of 100th Window. While guitars, strings and percussion are nothing new in the Massive Attack sound – indeed they were the winning card on many a trip – the new element here is the use of brass, with results that leave one a bit puzzled: while it contributes positively to the pathos of "Girl I Love You" (on which Horace Andy revisits one of his own old hits), the outcome feels uncertain and clumsy on "Flat Of The Blade", notable nonetheless for Guy Garvey's restless lyrics (⟦Q1⟧).

Hope Sandoval is another standout name on the record, delivering a splendid performance on "Paradise Circus", a sweet ballad built on hand-clapping and a string crescendo that slots right in among the Bristol outfit's finest gems. The much-discussed collaboration with their friend Damon Albarn, meanwhile, is confined to the single track "Saturday Come Slow", acoustic pop with a whiff of the unfinished about it.

Uneven and disorienting, Heligoland suffers from an excessive scattering of the duo's ideas and insights, failing to properly integrate collaborations that are left underdeveloped - too many of them for a record of just ten tracks. Still, the pair's poetic sensibility and technical mastery are fully confirmed: the closer, "Atlas Air", is another class act from Del Naja, who skillfully calibrates a series of stop&go moments, letting tribal percussion and off-beat synths offer glimpses of new worlds of unease and ruin still waiting to be explored.

As further proof that the Massive Attack engine was running smoothly into the 2000s, 2011 brought an excellent collaboration with the young William Bevan, aka Burial, champion of dubstep 2.0. And rarely has a combination felt this charged, given the plausible elective affinity between these three sacred beasts.

One track made four-handed, plus a remix. That's the "meager" haul to be found on Four Walls/ Paradise Circus, the Massive Attack vs. Burial encounter/clash: beats extracted, shaped and warped by the Hyperdub kid, with vocals handled by the cat and the fox.

The first half of the record is occupied by "Four Walls", in which the three let loose (so to speak) around the three-minute mark, giving rise to a sort of funeral march wonderfully held up by vocals that are at once celestial and chilling. Twelve minutes of electronic exoticism and melancholy by the bucketload. In the other half, meanwhile, an unexpected lunar reworking of "Paradise Circus" surfaces, sung by the muse Sandoval. The three somehow manage to mystify the matter, trying to make it more intimately ecstatic, laying down the usual Bevan-esque sonic carpet with its decadent backdrop, complete with an angelic coda and a slowed-down vocal passage in the middle, underpinned by permanently deep basses and an electric tick-tock that keeps bubbling up again and again like magma. Unfortunately, the moonless result it produces doesn't deliver much emotional payoff.

Adding it all up, only the brand-new joint composition between the trip-hop pioneers and the central pillar of that strange thing called dubstep really seems to work. Let's hope, then, that the desire to keep creating new material prevails in the future, rather than falling back on comfortable reheated leftovers.

After the now-customary five years of recording silence, the band returned in early 2016 with the EP Ritual Spirit. The fruit of careful socio-philosophical reflection, then: after four years of recording silence, Del Naja released an app in early January, "The Fantom", designed to mix the songs using heart rate, time of day and location. The first "guinea pig" of the experiment was, accordingly, this very EP.

Four tracks and four featured guests, then, for Ritual Spirit, which, true to the overall global outlook of the project, exists in an unusual, open and deliberately "unfinished" light.

The resurgent Roots Manuva is the first guest, on "Dead Editors" (a nod to the controversial Charlie Hebdo?), a track that moves at triple the speed of the old trip-hop days, followed by Azekel on "Ritual Spirit", the kind of Massive Attack-ish track you'd expect, with murky bass, an acoustic loop, echoes and hypnotized vocals, yet still effective in its own way, and by Young Fathers on a "Voodoo In My Blood" that wouldn't have been out of place among the sessions for Heligoland.

There's a surprise finale to close things out, with the classic-sounding "Take It There", in which none other than the ghost of Tricky reappears for a "rap" duet reminiscent of the Bristol-sound's golden days - nothing unexpected, yet still a pleasure to listen to, and one that brings a slight lump to the throat of anyone who grew up with Dummy, Protection and Mezzanine as the soundtrack to their existential teenage crises.

All things considered, there's little new to be found within the seventeen minutes of Ritual Spirit, especially factoring in the nearly five-year gap since its predecessor; yet, reading between the lines, there's a vitality and intellectual consistency that's anything but a given for a band that's been around for thirty years. A release perhaps physiologically scaled back by the project's broader "interdisciplinary" scope, but one that nonetheless leaves a positive impression ahead of the future productions already in the works for Bristol's open-ended duo.

Contributions by Giuliano Delli Paoli ("Four Walls/ Paradise Circus")

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