Massive Attack - 'mezzanine'

you've got to back that up with something

xpost:
100th window is not dull at all. the album which caught best the dark and dense atmosphere in the beginning of last year before bush started his war. it's all about textures.

I love love love the first track on 100th Window but then the rest of the album is a bit like a repeated, slightly less convincing re-iteration of that first track.

If you only count the last album, then yes, I fully agree. But up until Mezzanine: classique. I don't think Mezzanine holds up as well as the previous ones, strangely/maybe because of the punk influence being a bit too overt. Or at least that's what my addled brain makes of it. :-)

I like 100th Window; I never find the right time to listen to it, however, and as soon as I do, I'm sure it'll be one of my favourites.

Too bad. Your loss, man!

I've several Massive Attack live bootlegs that I play pretty often. They did a great extended Group Four when Mezzanine was current, very potent.

Too bad. Your loss, man!

-- latebloomer (posercore24...), October 2nd, 2004 8:35 PM.

I realise that texture is an extremely important factor in music, but if an artist concentrates solely on texture at the expense of other elements the music can slip very easily into self-indulgence in my opinion. That's all.

best alex in mainhattan post ever!

The parrot's dead now, and I haven't played the album in years.

I love the first two as well. 100th Window is OK, but haven't listened to it much. Mezzanine may be darker, but I don't quite get the goth thing! It surprises me that the general feeling is that it's not up to scratch. I tend to think the first few tracks are the worst (overexposure most likely).

The first four tracks of Mezzanine are fucking incredible, really atmospheric and powerful and dynamic too, but after that I switch off completely.

to describe MA as 'dire and embarassing' makes no sense to me. Ronan's complaint seems to boil down to taking offence to them being labelled as dance music when you can't dance to it. if that's true then i agree it is stupid but you can hardly blame the band for this. one man's 90s is another man's heaven. one man's boring is another man's hypnotic/mesmeric/sublime/dreamnoize...

These days I'm mildly addicted to Hymn of the Big Wheel, but I'll still happily listen to all of Blue Lines and Mezzanine. I bought 100W, listened to it a few times, and sold it to Easy Street... I just couldn't get into it. It fell really flat for me, and yeah- those Sinead lyrics were beyond dreadful. I played it in my friend's car once and spent most of the song apologizing for the lyrics.

they released one or two of the 'unreleased' ones via the web or exclusive mixes, iirc. so a fair number are out there...

https://pitchfork.com/news/massive-attack-reissue-mezzanine-as-dna-spray-paint-yes-you-read-that-correctly/

Ah that's a bummer, US tour dates postponed, reschedule announcement next week for fall.

Friend saw them in London last week and said it was lifeless and pretty boring. Not sure what excuse they're using for postponing, but I wouldn't be surprised if these don't actually get rescheduled.

Huh. Guess we'll see.

Yeah my friend said it was dull as ditchwater.

Bummer. Sounded very exciting on paper

i have not heard good things about this tour otherwise I might be trying to go

massive attack have always been a big deception in concert. i saw them a couple of times in the early nineties and it was always dull. somehow their music is not made for live shows. i love the albums though even 100th window.

Ticket prices for DC were really high. Made me hesitant

posts on facebook about the current north american tour thus far seem pretty positive?

I'll be heading out tomorrow night!

Yeah, the show here Saturday was, frankly, the best concert by anyone I've seen this year, and I did not expect to type that before seeing it. The posts just upthread, so not the case with what we experienced. My girlfriend's thoughts on it were more deep than I could convey and she's only shared them with a close circle, but I'll echo her in that it was an astoundingly good meditation on audience expectation, transforming the 'band plays classic album' approach, nostalgia in general and much more. Now granted, I've never fully dived into Adam Curtis's work, so what may seem truly striking to me when it came to their visuals may simply be run of the mill for others. But it was crucial to the whole experience, and the sense that it was being regularly updated too was key. Meantime, having never seen them live before either, this may also be their s.o.p., but their aggressively anti-star/showmanship approach worked a treat for me -- all the musicians lurking at the back of the stage, del Naja only coming up front for a few vocal turns, otherwise ceding the space to Horace Andy, Liz Fraser et al. (So wonderful to finally see him live, so great to finally see her again for the first time in 26 years.) No intros, no encores, but also, to expand on an earlier point, no simple playing through of the album at all -- I knew about the Bauhaus cover but none of the others, and it was a fascinating reclamation/reintepretation project with the resequenced album choices. I was properly amazed/amused by them actually playing "10:15 Saturday Night," then doing "Man Next Door" and not simply using the Cure sample but replicating it live at the slower pace. But the gut check time was the Pete Seeger cover and how it was used, staged and presented.

Wait, Liz is touring??? Oh brother, I'll be in the corner crying.

She sure is.

It was really good. the venue and the crowd were not. I had to retreat to the balcony to get away from apparently newly-returned burners who were pissing me off almost everywhere I went on the floor.

I liked the performance a whole lot, and I liked the films; but my wife didn't and I know some others who found them overly heavy-handed and obvious at times.

Venue was great, crowd was as well as could be expected in a near-stage general admission area, and the show was requisitely intense. The humorous bits of the visual play were a little less tongue-in-cheek and more blunt, and the harsh bits pretty harsh, but it gelled.

The ending with two displays on either side reminded me of an optometrist doing the “look to the center, can you see the figures to the top and bottom? And now?” Only it wasn’t letters or hands, but war and surveillance

Band and Liz were top notch!

why must the nyc show be on a thursday

oh shit, that's tonight? oh well.

I saw them on what most have been their previous tour and, like Kraftwerk live (and then some), it was much more impressive than I might have imagined. I want to say when I saw them the guest vocalists (like Fraser) appeared and disappeared as needed.

Wait, Liz is touring??? Oh brother, I'll be in the corner crying.

― Johnny Grottan from the Skeks Pistols (Leee)

Saw them do this in London and definitely had moist eyes during Teardrop, appropriately.

so gutted to have missed this during their European tour

Also saw this last Saturday. Group Four was all time live with Liz. Holy shit guys

This was as good as something of this sort could be, imo. They sounded great, and despite the facile Banksyness of the visual/textual content it had a lot of poignant moments, like when Liz sang "Where Have All The Flowers Gone?" against a backdrop of war footage - I choked up. The Bauhaus cover was fabulous and exhilarating.

Wait Liz is singing Risingson?

Nope.

Yeah just checked the setlist, she does a Pete Seeger cover then. It’s fucking awesome they’re doing covers of some of the samples within the album.

Is Bela Lugosi’s Dead sampled in Mezzanine?

despite the facile Banksyness of the visual/textual content

Well, Banksy IS in the band

This was super good

feel like I short-changed Horace Andy who probably never needs the shout out, but deserves it

I... am not really sure whether I liked this or not. something wasn't totally clicking, and I'm not sure what -- it wasn't the visual (heavy-handed but I was more or less expecting it to be), I don't think it was the arrangements (although it was a bit disappointing dissolved girl was playback, and I... wouldn't necessarily have put "levels" on the setlist). the energy felt 75% maybe?

really what is the deal with the "levels" bit? does it make any sense at all in the context of the show

Katherine yeah, it didn't really hit for me either.

xp I assumed it was some sort of commentary on tim bergling's death, maybe?

Maybe just hard to live up to the imaginative world that the original audio conjures

yeah