Massive Attack

No musical decade has undergone as violent an attempted erasure as the one inflicted on the Eighties by the following decade. However telling of renewed creativity, this attempt to sweep away the recent past turned out to be pure rhetoric: as early as 1998, Massive Attack delivered a veritable summa of new wave memories that, combined with their own personal and innovative style, gave birth to “Mezzanine”, one of the most celebrated English albums of the era.

The group, made up of Robert “3D” Del Naja, Grant Marshall (“Daddy G”) and Andrew Vowles (“Mushroom”), had already managed, with 1991's “Blue Lines” and 1994's “Protection”, to turn New York hip-hop into a concentrate of soul, reggae-dub and electronics with smoky, cinematic atmospheres, a sound everyone labelled “trip-hop” or the “Bristol sound”. From its very origins as an open collective (the “Wild Bunch”), the band proved capable of synthesizing wildly different musical and human experiences, presenting a “black” soul (tied above all to the dub and reggae experiments of Bristol's Caribbean community) and a “white” one that, through Del Naja, looked toward the electronic and dance music then expanding exponentially across the UK.

In 1998, through the practice of sampling, the group managed to create a work that was at once an encyclopaedic concentrate of quotations and the manifesto of a new sound, even measured against their own past output. Although they weren't the first to play that game of electronic cut-and-paste on other people's work known as sampling (which was, in fact, spreading widely at the time, causing quite a stir, especially given the obvious legal implications of such “creative theft”), Massive Attack were the first to turn it into a kind of cultural statement. Among the songs' credits, alongside names that obviously belong to the black-music canon (Isaac Hayes) and related territory (the ska of The Paragons), we find a series of borrowings drawn from the great melting pot of Eighties dark-wave: Wire, The Cure, Depeche Mode, Siouxsie and the Banshees (on the Japanese bonus track). But this reclaiming game doesn't stop at the sounds, because this time the star guest slot on vocals goes, after Tracey Thorn of Everything But The Girl appeared on “Protection”, to Elizabeth Fraser of the Cocteau Twins.

This incredible union of black electronics (dub) and white electronics (the atmospheric electronics championed by dark-wave) gives rise to a set of tracks where the usual hypnotic moods are joined by a monolithic density of sound, one that transcends urban unease and turns it into a tragedy of interiors falling apart. Tension runs high right from the apocalyptic opening track: “Angel” builds on an inexorable dub-bass-and-drums progression (immensely powerful, pitch-black), which grows slowly until the deflagrating entrance of a hard rock guitar. The alternation of pauses and tension is achieved by layering “real” instruments over the usual electronic textures: this is yet another innovation and stylistic signature of the record, one that would require an actual band for its live rendition. Against these typically rock elements, balance with the black side is guaranteed by the chanting of reggae singer Horace Andy, whose sulphurous charisma adds no small amount to a mixture that was already dark and tar-thick: “Angel” is the album's most representative track.

The equally obsessive “Risingson”, on the other hand, features the spoken-word rap of 3D and Daddy G in a softer but also more morbid setting, amid a riot of suffocating, mystically nightmarish sounds, underscored by the lyrics' slogans (“dream on”, but also an old “where have all the flowers gone?”). Worth noting is the sculptural bassline, so much so that one might think the “blue lines” of the debut had turned black, pregnant with an underground tension ready to break loose in the guitar parts. Another masterpiece of this art of building thriller-like atmospheres is “Inertia Creeps”, built entirely from Del Naja's dragging delivery, a hammering arsenal of percussion and, above all, sampled strings and Arabic sounds that transport the listener into a dark, suffocating, imaginary souk.

But the real showstopper is “Teardrop”. If the noir vocabulary deployed so far still holds, here we can speak of a genuine shaft of light piercing the darkness. Over a minimal rhythm track, like a pulsing heartbeat, and a celestial guitar arpeggio, the angelic voice of Liz Fraser rises, clear as a promise of salvation and redemption. Here the synthesis of dub sounds and dark atmospheres reaches perfection, resurrecting, in a thoroughly modern key, the abstract, esoteric sound of the 4AD label. The track would go on to enjoy huge media success, helped in no small part by its unsettling video, in which the melody is “sung” by the image of a foetus in the womb.

What's most striking about this incarnation of Massive Attack isn't so much their making electronic music impossible to dance to (they'd always done that) but their moving away from the misconception that trip-hop was relaxation music, or cocktail-lounge fodder, turning it instead into the vehicle for a dark metropolitan tension and putting it forward for spaces typically reserved for rock. In this convergence between the two worlds (the electronic and the “played”), the trio are remarkably close to Depeche Mode, a decidedly uncool band in '98, but one whose dramatic “Songs Of Faith And Devotion” is honestly quoted here, sampled a total of three times on “Group Four”.

Fraser's voice returns for this closing track and for the equally soft ballad “Black Milk”, proving once again enchanting and just as suited to the tracks closer to the lounge side of Massive Attack's output. The softer repertoire also includes “Dissolved Girl” (sung by Sara Jay), which nonetheless features a hard guitar interlude, and “Mezzanine”, the title track, marked by an effective rap from Del Naja and Marshall, who even manage to quote Gang Of Four in the line “give me evenings and weekends”.

The album's last true masterpiece, however, is “The Man Next Door”, thanks to a monolithic bassline, evocative guitar filigree and, above all, the shamanic charisma of Horace Andy. Anyone who has seen them live knows that the contrast between the band's cybernetic sound and this primal, Caliban-like Jamaican figure is one of Massive Attack's most effective syntheses, the perfect counterpart to the ethereal vocals of their female guests. The art of quotation proves masterful here, managing to make the ska melody of The Paragons' “Got To Get Away” coexist with a sample of the legendary rock drumming from Led Zeppelin's “When The Levee Breaks” and with a break where the obsessive guitar of The Cure's “10:15 Saturday Night” emerges: to call this open-mindedness would be an understatement.

Besides, this record is profoundly a child of its time in reworking quotations, memories, and fragments of musical past into a synthesis as chaotic as it is vital, a mirror of a society that had by then become just as Babel-like and omnivorous, defined by what former collaborator Tricky would later call "Pre-Millennium Tension".

The tightrope-walking required to maintain these fragile balances proved fatal for Massive Attack themselves too, who suffered the defection of Mushroom (the one most tied to black sounds) and saw an excessive dominance of 3D and the white element on the following "100th Window".

Meanwhile, the attitude of rediscovering the Eighties spread into an outright fad during the 2000s, albeit through other musical forms more tied to dance, with countless collaborations aimed at "legitimising" various veterans of the era in an electronic key (who remembers Siouxsie with Basement Jaxx?). The title of most serious encyclopedists of the past wave sound has surely since passed from Massive Attack to Lcd Soundsystem and DAF. As for 2008, it brought a fresh case of "escape from trip-hop" through darker, harder sounds with "Third" by fellow Bristolians Portishead.

It must be admitted, though, that "Mezzanine" never really had true successors from a strictly musical standpoint, and it remains a symbol of a particular era, when ethnic and cultural differences in big cities were seen as a source of tension that wasn't necessarily negative, but rather a harbinger of unimaginable creative developments. Few works, moreover, have been as capable as this Massive Attack album of distilling such a long span of English cultural history into music. For an effective parallel in the visual arts, one might cite the work of Gilbert and George, who were likewise particularly attuned to how, in the 2000s as in the Seventies, a people's true cultural identity is born from life lived in the streets, not from talk in polite drawing rooms or on television.

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16/07/2008