60 ALBUMS @ 60 : #11

Mezzanine – Massive Attack (1998)

I think it’s pretty obvious by now that I’m a bit more comfortable trying to write about guitar-based indie music than any other genre.  This rundown has contained a few bits of hip-hop/rap/dance, but they have been the exception.  I find it much harder to explain why some records from such genres have hit my sweet spot, while many others have landed very far from the mark.

Massive Attack had been responsible for one of what was, and still is, one of my all-time favourite singles, Protection.   I can put my hand on my heart and say the Tracey Thorn vocal is my all-time favourite of hers, and given I’ve been a lifelong fan of Everything But The Girl, that is something of a bold statement.

But, no matter how hard I tried, neither of the first two albums ever fully clicked with me at the time, a situation that would only change when I went revisiting in the years after I bought and fell hard for Mezzanine.

Hearing the song Teardrop proved to be the jaw-dropping moment.  I’m 99.99% sure my first exposure was through the airing of its promotional video on MTV2 or suchlike, as hearing the voice of Elizabeth Fraser via the medium of television was something quite rare, particularly in the late 90s.  If I had previously thought Tracey’s performance on Protection had been career-defining, then I was quite prepared to feel exactly the same way about Liz’s work with Massive Attack.

The single was purchased for a stupid amount of money – it was either £3.99 or £4.99, and I came away wondering if I’d have been better shelling out for the album.  I played Teardrop an awful lot over the following days, discovering that I was enjoying the remixes and the b-side, Euro Zero Zero almost as much, and so I bought the album a few weeks later, probably just after the next pay day.

I found it to be an astonishing listen from start to end.  I couldn’t imagine any other trip-hop album being so dark, almost gothic like in nature, with the sounds seeming to have been engineered so that every note carried a sense of menace or a warning of impending danger.

mp3: Massive Attack – Mezzanine

I hadn’t, until this point in time, fully appreciated the skill and craft deployed by Massive Attack.  It led to a revisiting of the previous two albums, and a greater acknowledgement of how consistently excellent they had been.

A few years ago, as part of a festive period series, I posted a contemporary review of Mezzanine that had been written by Barney Hoskyns for Rolling Stone Magazine.  He described it as ‘a richly eclectic, unpigeonholeable artifact’ which seems just about perfect.

Only the Top 10 left now.  I’m sure regular readers will have just about worked out who are most likely to appear.

JC