David Bennun Foreign CD of the week
`It is,” observed one visitor to my flat, “a bit bloody gloomy, isn’t it?” My visitor was referring to Massive Attack’s new CD, Mezzanine (Virgin), an album so dark that it seems to soak up the light in the room like a miniature black hole. It was playing for the seventh time and it wasn’t getting any brighter.
When the band’s first album, Blue Lines, came out in 1991, it was so shockingly different and brilliant, that hardly anyone noticed it was a hip-hop revolution, because hardly anyone recognised it as hip-hop. When Protection arrived three years later, it took about two months to realise it was sublime. The band had made a second masterpiece by daring to distance themselves from the first.
Now Massive Attack have once again changed tack and come up with a third eye- poppingly distinct record. Mezzanine is gorgeously bleak. It is a beautiful and in no way laughable or exaggerated record – about disillusion, depression, death, decay and all the other big, bad D-words. If anything, it’s Gothic in the literary sense.
Mezzanine sounds performed rather than programmed, and there’s fuzz guitar all over the shop. Only a couple of tracks are resolutely digitised: Inertia Creeps and the title track. Core members Robert Del Naja and Grant Marshall have turned thoroughly nasty on Black Milk and Group 4 (“To think that I lay next to you, wasting time”).
If the sense of the album is that everything’s wrong, then that feeling has rarely been more effectively expressed. Mezzanine takes time to be fully appreciated. By then you’ll be begging for the Happy Happy Joy Joy song. That or a litre of gin. But it’ll be worth it.