CD of the week
Greg Bowes
Craig Armstrong arranged the strings on Massive Attack classics like Weather Storm and Sly, and almost everything about The Space Between Us, his orchestral debut for the Bristolian superstars’ label Melankolik, is breathtaking.
Firstly, there’s the sleeve, which folds out to about half a metre in length and which contains a series of gorgeous pastel and black and white photos of people, surveillance cameras and textures, with absolutely no information. This sits behind the CD, and reveals Armstrong’s collaborators: Marius de Vries (one-time Bjrk arranger), Elizabeth Fraser (of the Cocteau Twins), Paul Buchanan (a vocalist who’s Jeff Buckley and Tom Waits at once) and the Massive bunch.
Then, of course, there’s the music that comes from such magical meetings. Both of the aforementioned Massive Attack tracks appear here in stripped-down form, and they’re as mighty as ever. It’s as though Armstrong has distilled their very essence into miniatures of mammoth emotional intensity – remarkable. Sandwiched between them is the pairing with Fraser, This Love, which is as echoey and haunting as anything the Cocteau Twins ever did and which almost outdoes her hit collaboration with Massive Attack, Teardrop.
The rest would suit any film-maker with an expansive eye – Peter Greenaway or Bernardo Bertolucci – to a T. Armstrong has the brilliant, beautiful ability and dramatic sensibility of the best film-scorers – John Barry, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Michael Nyman or Philip Glass – and when piano, violin and cello sweep and crash across trip-hop’s minimal and forward-sloping drum’n’bass battery he’s like John Carpenter on ecstasy in the garden of delights.
An auspicious arrival; let’s hope Hollywood doesn’t snap him up too soon.