Massive Attack
Certain albums demand to be listened to at a certain time. Massive Attack’s Mezzanine (1998) needs to be listened to at night when the darkness and atmospherics held within can induce a mix of chills and excitement.
For a band that had grown in popularity and critical acclaim for their laid back, soulful blend of dub, electronica and hip-hop—captured to thrilling effect on their first two albums Blue Lines (1991) and Protection (1994), Mezzanine was a decidedly darker adventure, even by trip-hop standards.
The predator that lurks on the cover of the album perfectly represents the moods locked in the album – it’s in-your-face, confusing, demonic, and eerie. It’s startling at times and soothing at others. Fear is a difficult emotion to surface from the grooves of a vinyl record because it lacks a visual— the discomfort you experience while listening can only be crafted with the help of your imagination. Massive Attack makes you think about what you would see onscreen during a Tobe Hooper or Alfred Hitchcock film. And, when Massive Attack did give their songs a visual representation, they surface the unexpected, like a foetus singing “Teardrop” from inside the womb and from their respective music videos.
Augmenting their samples and keyboards with a studio band, Mezzanine open with "Angel," a stark production featuring pointed beats and a distorted bassline that frames the vocal (by group regular Horace Andy) and a two-minute flame-out with raging guitars.
"Risingson" is a dense, dark feature for Massive Attack themselves (on production as well as vocals), with a kitchen sink's worth of dubby effects and reverb.
"Teardrop" introduces another genius collaboration - with Elizabeth Fraser from Cocteau Twins - from a production unit with a knack for recruiting gifted performers. The blend of earthy with ethereal shouldn't work at all, but Massive Attack pull it off in fine fashion.
"Inertia Creeps" could well be the highlight, another feature for just the core threesome. With eerie atmospherics, fuzz-tone guitars, and a wealth of effects, the song could well be the best production from the best team of producers the electronic world had ever seen.
Obviously, the rest of the album can't compete, but there's certainly no sign of the side-two slump heard on Protection, as both Andy and Fraser return for excellent, mid-tempo tracks ("Man Next Door" and "Black Milk," respectively).
Mezzanine feels like an abandonment of everything Massive Attack was known for at the time, considering the great success they achieved with their dance-oriented songs.
After touring both of their albums extensively, the band started to become disconnected, and creative differences changed the way they produced their music in the studio. Each member wrote their contributions for the album in solitude and sometimes avoided contact with each other to refresh their creative drives.
If you think about it, it’s similar to how Outkast composed Speakerboxx/The Love Below, but Andre 3000 and Big Boi frequently collaborated and critiqued each other’s music without any animosity during their respective solo recording experiences.
Bleak. Blurry. Beautiful. This is Mezzanine.
Perhaps the defining album of the trip-hop era. It exhibits Massive Attack at its apex production wise and in songcraft, showing how the use of, and cross-pollination between, samples should be used as an element of songwriting and not the root cause (with the exception of “Black Milk”).
Its dark embrace is one worth giving into and allowing yourself to be lost in. It will forever take me back to late nights spent working when the music seemed to stir a collective desire for creativity. It’s charged with energy and primed to awaken the senses in a way that few albums in the later part of the 1990s dared to do.
Mushroom and Daddy G left the band shortly after the release of Mezzanine, leaving 3D alone to follow up the album five years later with 100th Window. Considering all of the hardship the band experienced during the production of the album, it makes sense that its initial running title was Damaged Goods. Every contributing musician was experiencing their own set of personal problems and sought to solve them through their music, revealing each person is flawed in their own unique way.
Mezzanine works just fine as the title, at the end of the day, though. While Massive Attack had found great success in life thanks to their music, they still had to deal with dense issues that controlled their perception of everyday life. By the end of the project, it’s clear everyone makes it safely to the “mezzanine” between good and evil.
Original recording released April 20, 1998
