![madvillainy album needledrop madvillainy album needledrop](https://pics.awwmemes.com/this-tiny-pc-i-built-matches-the-color-theme-of-71424589.png)
![madvillainy album needledrop madvillainy album needledrop](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/-J85naYNmck/sddefault.jpg)
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.
![madvillainy album needledrop madvillainy album needledrop](http://pm1.narvii.com/7251/db4d4b5fcf81069478b7498944ea91c722905717r1-750-777v2_uhq.jpg)
On “Risingson,” Grant “Daddy G” Marshall nails the boredom and anxiety of being stuck somewhere you can’t stand with someone you’re starting to feel the same way about (“Why you want to take me to this party and breathe/I’m dying to leave/Every time we grind you know we severed lines”).īut Mezzanine’s defining moments come from guest vocalists who were famous long before Massive Attack even released their first album. “Dissolved Girl” reiterates this theme from the perspective of guest vocalist Sarah Jay Hawley (“Passion’s overrated anyway”). The voice singing it-Massive Attack's cornerstone co-writer/producer Robert “3D” Del Naja-is raspy from exhaustion. Sex, in “Inertia Creeps,” is reduced to a meeting of “two undernourished egos, four rotating hips,” the focus of a failing relationship that's left its participants too numbed with their own routine dishonesty to break it off. The lyrics establish this atmosphere all on their own. There’s no safety from harm here, nothing you’ve got to be thankful for, nobody to take the force of the blow: what Mezzanine provides instead is a succession of parties and relationships and panopticons where the walls won’t stop closing in. The album corroded their tendencies to make big-wheel hymnals of interconnected lives where hope and despair trade precedent-on Mezzanine, it’s alienation all the way down. The band's third album (not counting the Mad Professor-remixed No Protection) completes the last in a sort of de facto Bristol trilogy, where Tricky’s youthful iconoclasm and Portishead’s deep-focus emotional intensity set the scene for Massive Attack’s sense of near-suffocating dread. Instead- or maybe as a result-they laid down their going-nova genre's definitive paranoia statement with Mezzanine. This was raw-nerved music, too single-minded and intense to carry an obvious timestamp.īut Massive Attack were the origin point of the trip-hop movement they and their peers were striving to escape the orbit of, and they nearly tore themselves to shreds in the process. And Portishead’s ’97 self-titled saw the stress-fractured voice of Beth Gibbons envisioning romance as codependent, mutually assured destruction while Geoff Barrow sunk into his RZA-noir beats like The Conversation’s Gene Hackman ruminating over his surveillance tapes. Tricky rebelled against being attached at the hip to a scene he was already looking to shed and decamped for Jamaica to record a more aggressive, bristling-energy mutation of his style in ’96 the name Pre-Millennium Tension is the only obvious thing that tells you it’s two decades old rather than two weeks. The best of it has aged far more gracefully (and forcefully) than anything recorded in the waning days of the record industry’s pre-filesharing monomania has any right to.