FEATURE:
Angels and Teardrops
Massive Attack’s Mezzanine at Twenty-Five
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RELEASED on 20th April, 1998…
IN THIS PHOTO: Massive Attack in 1998/PHOTO CREDIT: Kevin Westenberg
I wanted to look ahead to the twenty-fifth anniversary of Massive Attack’s third studio album, Mezzanine. An album conceptualised by their lead Robert Del Naja in 1997, he wanted to create something darker than any previous album from the Bristol crew. Grant Marshall (a group member) supported this direction. Fellow member Andrew Vowles was not so sure, and the production process was tense and often near the point where Massive Attack split. Like some genius albums that were made during huge periods of tension and disagreement – such as Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours -, Mezzanine is a masterpiece. Alongside 1991’s Blue Lines, it is Massive Attack’s absolute peak. It would be four years until they followed Mezzanine with 100th Window. They never hit the same highs as they did on 1998’s Mezzanine. One of the defining albums of the ‘90s, I wanted to explore it in greater detail. Still an album that sounds like nothing else, it reached number one in the U.K. upon its release. I want to get to some features before a couple of positive reviews. In fact, it is hard to find anything less than glowing praise of the 1998 work of brilliance! The first feature I want to highlight is from The Paris Review written around the twentieth anniversary of Mezzanine, Michael A. Gonzales shared his thoughts about a classic:
“Mezzanine, which celebrates its twentieth anniversary on April 20, was a departure from the gritty electronica of Massive Attack’s first two projects, Blue Lines and Protection. It incorporates more rock elements, including a newly hired band with the guitarist Angelo Bruschini, formerly of the New Wave band the Numbers, leading the charge and change. Mezzanine is an album best listened to loud, preferably on earphones, to properly hear the layers of weirdness and rhythms, a soulful sound collage that was miles away from the “Parklifes” and “Champagne Supernovas” of their Brit-pop contemporaries Blur and Oasis.
“In the beginning, the sampler was our main musical instrument,” Daddy G said in his slight West Indian accent. “When we first formed Massive Attack, basically we were DJs who went into the studio with our favorite records and created tracks. At the time, we tried to rip off the entire style of American hip-hop performers, but we realized, as artists, it’s important to be yourself. We realized it made no sense for us to talk about the South Bronx. Slowly but surely, we had to reclaim our identities as Brit artists who wanted to do something different with our music.”
Massive Attack unintentionally kicked off a new British Invasion in the nineties that was as powerful as the Beatles in the sixties, Led Zeppelin in the seventies, or Duran Duran in the eighties. Beginning with their sophisticated debut, Blue Lines, which featured the vocalist Shara Nelson on the masterful “Unfinished Sympathy” and “Safe from Harm,” there was something special about their blunted cinematic (Martin Scorsese was another hero) sound that had a paranoid artfulness. For me, having long grown bored with the stunted growth of many American rap artists during that era of “jiggy” materialism and thug tales of nineties rap, their slowed-down music (tape loops, samples, and beats) created an often dreamy, sometimes nightmarish sound that was fresh and futuristic. The author Will Self called it a “sinuous, sensual, subversive soundscape.”
Blue Lines was accessible avant-garde and comprehensible experimentation. From first listen, I could tell they were as inspired by the pioneering producers Marley Marl, Lee “Scratch” Perry, and Prince as they were by Burt Bacharach, John Barry, and Brian Eno. The trip-hop label was bestowed on the group by the Brit journalist Jonathan Taylor to describe the trippy music that was simultaneously street and psychedelic. Trip-hop was a tag that, like jazz, was often rejected by the practitioners, but it fit perfectly. A few years later, when I started contributing short fiction to the Brown Sugar erotica series, I imagined the stories as textual films, and it was Massive Attack that supplied the seductive score.
“Angel,” the third single from Mezzanine, would go on to become one of their most licensed songs, used for the opening credits of the series House as well as by the director George Miller in Mad Max: Fury Road. Over the years, Massive Attack’s music has been used in many movies (Pi, The Matrix, The Insider) and television programs (Luther, True Blood, Power). The videos for their own songs, including the four singles from Mezzanine (“Risingson,” “Teardrop,” “Angel,” and “Inertia Creeps”), were always sinister and disturbing. Massive’s hybrid music achieved pop-cult status, selling millions of copies while still being critically lauded.
Yet in 1998, at least, the group itself was still somewhat anonymous. They could walk around the city without being bothered. Mushroom and I popped out of the studio and went to a juice stand. He told me about his years living in New York, where he was the protégé of Devastating Tito from the rap group the Fearless Four. “Have you ever heard of them?” he asked shyly. When I told him my best friend Jerry Rodriguez had directed their video for “Problems of the World” in 1983, Mushroom smiled. “Finally,” he replied, “someone who knows about the old school”.
With songs like Angel, Teardrop and Inertia Creeps in the line-up, there are few albums that are as incredible. It is hard to put into the words the significance and impact of Mezzanine. Erie, dark, beautiful and sweeping at the same time, the music world was gifted something very special on 20th April, 1998. Stereogum provided their take for its twentieth anniversary back in 2018:
“Movie-soundtrack programmers figured it out almost immediately: If you want to conjure a certain vibe, you go directly to Mezzanine. The vibe in question isn’t an easy thing to define. It’s a feeling of ominous sensual mystery. It’s the feeling that something is about to happen. It could be sex or death or oblivion. You don’t know, and you’re stuck waiting. It’s the sound of anticipation.
It doesn’t just work in movies and TV shows, either. It works in actual lives. Mezzanine is an album that entered the cultural bloodstream upon arrival, and moments on it are etched so deeply into our own personal memories that just hearing the album means feeling a flood of sense-memory. I have this particular memory of hearing the beginning of “Teardrop,” over crappy Walkman headphones, while returning home from college for the first time. I was crammed into a terrifyingly tiny plane, the only kind that ever seemed to leave from the Syracuse airport, sweating and shaking, feeling like I was about to die. But as I heard that chiming harpsichord and that slow-tap drumbeat and Liz Fraser’s unearthly coo, I watched the sun setting behind the snow-lined pine trees on the border of the runway, and I couldn’t help but marvel at the beauty of the moment. “Teardrop” seemed appropriate, both for the fear and for the sudden and unexpected moment of wonder. It’s a perfect song, one that soothes anxiety even as it complements it.
Massive Attack’s music had always found space for some combination of beauty and dread, but it had never done it like this before. Blue Lines and Protection, the two albums that preceded Mezzanine, only really sound slick and expansive when you hold Mezzanine up for comparison. Those albums combined sounds in ways that nobody had ever heard. Rap and reggae and dance and R&B were all finding common ground in the UK pop music of the era, and a group like Soul II Soul were essentially working from the same aesthetic building blocks that Massive Attack were, at least in the beginning. (They also shared a producer, Nellee Hooper.) But Massive Attack’s great innovation was to turn those sounds inward, to present them in a way that was full of doubt and longing.
Mezzanine took those same feelings and blew them all the way out. All those same sounds are present on Mezzanine, and they’re heavier and deeper than they’d ever been. The three members of Massive Attack had always been big fans of dub reggae, and they’d brought the dub innovator Mad Professor in to remix their entire Protection album. Mezzanine was the moment that they truly figured out how to use those disorienting sonic textures and layers in their own music, to feed the emotional resonance that they’d always been chasing. The reggae legend Horace Andy, a longtime Massive Attack collaborator, sings three songs on Mezzanine, and they’re all altered versions of his own old songs. So those tracks almost work the way dub versions might’ve done — taking these warm, welcoming old tracks and turning them into pure nightmare fuel”.
I am going to round off with a couple of reviews. I know there was a twentieth anniversary of Mezzanine. The record was encoded into synthetic DNA (a first for an album). The project was in collaboration with TurboBeads Labs in Switzerland. This is what AllMusic said about Mezzanine when they sat down to review it:
“Increasingly ignored amidst the exploding trip-hop scene, Massive Attack finally returned in 1998 with Mezzanine, a record immediately announcing not only that the group was back, but that they'd recorded a set of songs just as singular and revelatory as on their debut, almost a decade back. It all begins with a stunning one-two-three-four punch: "Angel," "Risingson," "Teardrop," and "Inertia Creeps." Augmenting their samples and keyboards with a studio band, Massive Attack 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)”.
After twenty-five years, Mezzanine remains this huge album that is considered to be one of the all-time best. Pitchfork gave Massive Attack’s third studio album 9.3 when they reviewed it in 2017. That was an upgrade of 8.1 from their original 1998 review. It shows that Mezzanine grows in stature through the years and reveals its true brilliance the more you listen:
“But Mezzanine’s defining moments come from guest vocalists who were famous long before Massive Attack even released their first album. Horace Andy was already a legend in reggae circles, but his collaborations with Massive Attack gave him a wider crossover exposure, and all three of his appearances on Mezzanine are homages or nods to songs he'd charted with in his early-’70s come-up. “Angel” is a loose rewrite of his 1973 single “You Are My Angel,” but it’s a fakeout after the first verse—originally a vision of beauty (“Come from way above/To bring me love”), transformed into an Old Testament avenger: “On the dark side/Neutralize every man in sight.” The parenthetically titled, album-closing reprise of “(Exchange)” is a ghostly invocation of Andy’s “See a Man’s Face” cleverly disguised as a comedown track. And then there’s “Man Next Door,” the John Holt standard that Andy had previously recorded as “Quiet Place”—on Mezzanine, it sounds less like an overheard argument from the next apartment over and more like a close-quarters reckoning with violence heard through thin walls ready to break. It’s Andy at his emotionally nuanced and evocative best.
The other outside vocalist was even more of a coup: Liz Fraser, the singer and songwriter of Cocteau Twins, lends her virtuoso soprano to three songs that feel like exorcisms of the personal strife accompanying her band’s breakup. Her voice serves as an ethereal counterpoint to speaker-rattling production around it. “Black Milk” contains the album’s most spiritually unnerving words (“Eat me/In the space/Within my heart/Love you for God/Love you for the Mother”), even as her lead and the elegiac beat make for some of its most beautiful sounds. She provides the wistful counterpoint to the night-shift alienation of “Group Four.” And then there's “Teardrop,” her finest moment on the album. Legend has it the song was briefly considered for Madonna; Andrew “Mushroom” Vowles sent the demo to her, but was overruled by Daddy G and 3D, who both wanted Fraser. Democracy thankfully worked this time around, as Fraser’s performance—recorded in part on the day she discovered that Jeff Buckley, who she’d had an estranged working relationship and friendship with, had drowned in Memphis’ Wolf River—was a heart-rending performance that gave Massive Attack their first (and so far only) UK Top 10 hit.
Originally set for a late ’97 release, Mezzanine got pushed back four months because Del Naja refused to stop reworking the tracks, tearing them apart and rebuilding them until they’re so polished they gleam. It sure sounds like the product of bloody-knuckled labor, all that empty-space reverb and melted-together multitrack vocals and oppressive low-end. (The first sound you hear on the album, that lead-jointed bassline on “Angel,” is to subwoofers what “Planet Earth” is to high-def television.) But it also groans with the burden of creative conflict, a working process that created rifts between Del Naja and Vowles, who left shortly after Mezzanine dropped following nearly 15 years of collaboration.
Mezzanine began the band’s relationship with producer Neil Davidge, who’d known Vowles dating back to the early ’90s and met the rest of the band after the completion of Protection. He picked a chaotic time to jump in, but Davidge and 3D forged a creative bond working through that pressure. *Mezzanine *was a document of unity, not fragmentation. Despite their rifts, they were a post-genre outfit, one that couldn’t separate dub from punk from hip-hop from R&B because the basslines all worked together and because classifications are for toe tags. All their acknowledged samples—including the joy-buzzer synths from Ultravox’s “Rockwrok” (“Inertia Creeps”), the opulent ache of Isaac Hayes’ celestial-soul take on “Our Day Will Come” (“Exchange”), Robert Smith’s nervous “tick tick tick” from the Cure’s “10:15 Saturday Night,” and the most concrete-crumbling throwdown of the Led Zep “Levee” break ever deployed (the latter two on “Man Next Door”)—were sourced from 1968 and 1978, well-traveled crate-digging territory. But what they build from that is its own beast.
Their working method never got any faster. The four-year gap between Protection and Mezzanine became a five-year gap until 2003’s 100th Window, then another seven years between that record and 2010’s Heligoland, plus another seven years and counting with no full-lengths to show for it. Not that they've been slacking: we've gotten a multimedia film/music collaboration with Adam Curtis, the respectable but underrated Ritual Spirit EP, and Del Naja’s notoriously rumored side gig as Banksy. (Hey, 3D does have a background in graffiti art.) But the ordeal of both recording and touring Mezzanine took its own toll. A late ’98 interview with Del Naja saw him optimistic about its reputation-shedding style: “I always said it was for the greater good of the fucking project because if this album was a bit different from the last two, the next one would be even freer to be whatever it wants to be.” But fatigue and restlessness rarely make for a productive mixture, and that same spark of tension which carried *Mezzanine *over the threshold proved unsustainable, not just for Massive Attack’s creativity but their continued existence.
Still, it’s hard not to feel the album’s legacy resonating elsewhere—and not just in “Teardrop” becoming the cue for millions of TV viewers to brace themselves for Hugh Laurie’s cranky-genius-doctor schtick. Graft its tense feelings of nervy isolation and late-night melancholy onto two-step, and you’re partway to the blueprint for Plastician and Burial. You can hear flashes of that mournful romantic alienation in James Blake, the graceful, bass-riddled emotional abrasion in FKA twigs, the all-absorbing post-genre rock/soul ambitions in Young Fathers or Algiers. Mezzanine stands as an album built around echoes of the ’70s, wrestled through the immediacy of its creators' tumultuous late ’90s, and fearless enough that it still sounds like it belongs in whatever timeframe you're playing it".
On 20th April, the supreme Mezzanine celebrates twenty-five years. I remember when it came out in 1998. It was an exciting year for music, and I was appreciating genres like Trip Hop and Electronica more. I don’t think there is any fault of weaknesses with Mezzanine. It is one of those flawless albums. I think it will stun, amaze, and inspire…
FOR decades more.