Massive Attack - Mezzanine POLL

reunion album please.

voted 'inertia creeps' over 'group four'. so strange to see lex referring to this as such a winter album cuz it (and most triphop tbh) has always played as very much a summer album to me. not in that summery poppy way like the avalanches or free design or whatever but in the way the heat is unrelenting and engulfing and suffocating almost, that weary tension in the air.

OTM

the last time i listened to this album was while driving through the desert at night (this summer)

my fav is "dissolved girl"

"Teardrop" is not the House theme in the UK? Weird.

This was my 'exercise' album a decade or so ago so I always relate it to sweat. Never thought of it as cold.

late night album, tired tension, release, and paranoia imo

The end of Group Four was one of my absolute favorite bits of music for a while.

This one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uT_ZoiR3vw0

This is really difficult. I love the brooding bassline building up in Angel. Teardrop is great. Group Four is menacing and desperate. Risingson has that brilliant "toylike people make me boylike" verse. One of those four.

Looks like the title track is gonna lose out here. Which doesn't surprise me - a great tune hiding in the shadow of the track it precedes and the track it sounds like ("Group Four" and "Risingson" respectively).

After watching too many seasons of House, I know my vote won't be for "Teardrop".

The sad thing is I used to really love this song, but now it annoys because of House.

all these half votes
x-post

This makes me glad I've ever seen house, as a world where teardrop is diminished would suck hard

"never" that is

Never seen House either. Only instances I recall right now of songs off this album being used in films are:

Dissolved Girl - The Jackal, Matrix
Angel - Snatch, π/Pi :order of chaos
Inertia Creeps - Collateral

I'm sure there's many more. Wikipedia has a list but I'm sure it's missing half of them (Collateral and Pi are missing per example). There were a couple of years were it felt like library music for Hollywood producers to choose from. I got afraid it would kill the joys of this album.

Here's imdb's list. More complete:

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1039315/

I don't see Collateral's use of Inertia Creeps in there. I was almost certain it played in a bar scene. I must be mixing it with something else.

In other things, for a long long time I misheard 'Man Next Door' lyrics as:

He gets in so late at night
Always a fuzzing fart

Which sucks because the song has one of my favorite basslines in the album but the lyrics were stupid to me... kept thinking the song was, literally, about an old man farting so loud that he kept his neighbors awake and while I found it kind of funny it seemed completely inappropriate and out of place with the rest of the album.

I swear Horace Andy pronounces 'Fight' as 'Fart'.

Always heard it as "always a fussy fart", like some old grandpa who returns from his card game at 11pm and starts demanding someone prepare him dinner and clean up the mess in the bathroom.

Most common TV usage here is as background mood music for investigative journalism pieces on our govt-owed broadcaster re the decline of some rare type of coral or the perils of low doc lending.

To think that I lay next to you
Wasting time when I could do
A simple job in strip lights

This has always struck me as one of the most quietly desperate lyrics ever written.

Side B trumps side A in much the same whay as on 'Disintegration' and for the same reason I find itd ifficult to single out a track from teh 2nd half - anyway Black Milk or title track for me.

I voted Angel, but giving it a second listen Group Four is the one that I wanted to replay the most.

Dissolved Girl for me, but Black Milk's not far behind. It's one of the few albums I will still comfortably listen to all the way through.

Might have to go for Man Next Door as a perfect distillation of the album - dub + the Cure + paranoia. But then there's Risingson - I do love those rare tracks when 3D and Daddy G are rapping together.

I had to write a story recently about how this album was made and it's a marvel that it was finished at all. An utterly dysfunctional band at this point. There's an interesting quote from 3D at the time where he suggests that the security guard in Group Four was basically him - shunning friends and family to stay up all night working. Other fun facts: Mushroom allegedly tried to give an early version of Teardrop to Madonna and Angel started out as a cover of The Clash's Straight to Hell (with a Sex Gang Children sample) but they had to rewrite it when Horace refused to sing the word "hell".

man next door is awesome to sing along to

Hmmm... Maybe Risingson?

which one had the creepiest video from this album?

best MA video is still Karmacoma

LOL i always heard it as "fight" but now i'm never gonna be able to hear that song without hearing "fart", thanks yall

Angel started out as a cover of The Clash's Straight to Hell (with a Sex Gang Children sample) but they had to rewrite it when Horace refused to sing the word "hell".

tremendous

he won't sing hell but he'll sing fart.

I'd forgotten about the evil squelchy bassline that comes in at 2.33 in Risingson. We have a winner.

Other fun facts: Mushroom allegedly tried to give an early version of Teardrop to Madonna

Ahem.

voted for 'man next door', but i really can't recall the second half of the record that good - what's the one with the guitar crescendo around the middle?

"Dissolved Girl" probably. "Group Four" has a guitar crescendo at the end.

^^ just checked them quickly on youtube. it's 'dissolved girl' i was thinking about - never really cared that much about that tune, especially because of the guitar-bombast thing - same reason why i don't rate 'angel' as much as i should. i'm way more into massive attack when they're capturing the tension, not so much when it comes to releasing it in some sort of quasi-industrial frame.*

*which works in a live setting, tho.

Not a fan of this album but I love "exchange" with the Isaac Hayes sample. Proto Quiet Village/Seahawks?

"Dissolved Girl" isn't one of my faves on the album but I would have thought a lot of the point of the guitar dynamics there and elsewhere are about the tension/release dynamic as a whole rather than straight release - the way they let loose then rein it back in.

^^ i understand that, and i feel you're right. for me, the main problem is probably the cruchy guitar sound itself and - in 'dissolved girl's case - the way it gives me some 90's industrial vibes when combined with that trampling rhythm.

one of the things i love about 'man next door' - besides horace andy's vocals, obv - is the way the overall "heaviness" of it is more implicit/subdued that shoved in your face, or something like that...

sorry for my bad english, dunno if i'm making any sense here.

No that does make sense to me - I could definitely imagine finding their deployment of the dynamic heavyhanded.

when "angel" starts to "rock out", it gets really bad, imo. i think I'd like it better if it was more subtle with the "and here's the loud part" stuff. The big rock drums/distorted guitar is totally not necessary.

I half expect one of the dudes from 311 to pop in

At the time of release Angel's rock out actually felt subtle and elegant when compared with 'electro-rock' songs by say, Chemical Brothers or Prodigy, per example.

I know it's not an adequate comparison but I can't think of any albums from the time that sound like Mezzanine. Closest reference would be Maxinquaye and it feels like cheating.

Speaking about the music videos I prefer Karmacoma and Protection than the ones from Mezzanine, but the signing phetus baby of Teardrop still looks and feels mindblowing to me. Maybe I was too young at the time but that video made a heavy impression on me, a few days later I bought the album when I was around 13/14 just to listen to that song and it wasn't until a year later that I started actually listening to the rest of the songs. It changed my life. Sort of.

xxp I was there,, idk, it just sounds like bland alt rock to me

Dissolved Girl is much clunkier in its deployment of rock guitars that most of the rest of Mezzanine - there are guitars all over this album and they're mostly perfectly integrated within the record. Dissolved Girl just feels like a generic trip-hop record with a Beavis & Butthead riff awkwardly tacked on the end. There's a definite sag in the middle of the album but the beginning and end are so strong it doesn't matter too much.

Matt OTM - Dissolved Girl's the worst by far.

"Angel" just reminds me of slow-moving black limousines passing through while people in suits stand around

Hearing the “hunger mix” and the Massive Attack live cover of Bela Lugosi’s Dead has made it click how influential Bauhaus’ goth dub pieces were to Mezzanine.

I think 100th Window is Mezzanine's equal. It's a different chill for a different time - maybe it's just because I'm old enough to remember 2003 but not 1998 I don't know. But Special Cases (via a compilation or two) was known to be there during impressionable nighttime car rides so it has an instant evocativeness that pulls the rest of the album with it. Basically ineffable attachment I have to the album and its 'context' (my version).

I think the glacial stasis of 100th Wondow is a strength, not a weakness

otm

3D probably the one who has the most money thanks to his Banksy side gig.

I haven’t seen much online speculation about this in the last months, but I wonder if that is because everyone has already concluded that this is the case.

My theory is that Banksy is not a single person. There’s probably three or four people working together as Banksy. Robert might be one of them.

Banksy is a collective formed by Robert Del Naja, Robin Gunningham and Prince Harry.

yeah it must take a whole committee to create those genius works

Harry on his own, i'll buy that