massive attack : back! back!! back!!!

Getting quite into this actually. Early faves: Pray For Rain, Girl I Love You, Psyche, Paradise Circus (those strings at the end!).

There's two different Psyches btw. 3:48 = EP version, 3:21 = album version.

Paradise Circus is kind of creepily beautiful but the album as a whole is a bit of a drag. I wouldn't compare it to Mezzanine, which has a kind of coiled-spring momentum that's largely absent here.

How much input did Daddy G have with this record, incidentally? It feels a bit cheeky to be still using the Massive Attack name if it's just an outlet for 3D's monged out goth tendencies.

after two listens i dare say that i was not wrong in my skepticism. two tracks could grab my attention though. "girl i love you" and "paradise circus". especially the former is phantastic and would have fitted well onto "100th window" with the menacing, hypnotic bass line. "paradise circus" is mainly great because of hope sandoval. i like her voice even more now than before. still sleepy but less intrusive. more subtle, more mature.

The early faves I posted above are the only properly good tracks. Rush Minute and the Damon one aren't bad, the rest is various shades of meh.

But, you know, four good and two alright isn't bad for an album by a band at this stage in their career.

the subtle of ageism of lowered expectations

How do I make the start of "Paradise Circus" my ringtone?

xpost : Dear Mr. Snrub, I use mobilespin.net because it is so easy even a fool such as I can use it successfully.

http://www.mp3-to-m4r.net worked like a charm. I love web software that doesn't make you download anything or register your email. The first 40 seconds of "Paradise Circus" is now my ringtone. Rock!!

this album is terrible.

This is mostly ehhhhh, but "Girl I Love You" is fucking fantastic.

I had been totally mystified how such a great band could turn to such shit after the godlike genius of their first three albums, THEN I read on the wigglypedia that Manfred Mann sued their asses right after Mezzanine came out for sampling "Tribute" on "Black Milk." And now it all makes sense. Go listen to "Black Milk," then listen to "Black Melt" (which is the version of the song without the sample) and it sounds exactly like this. Now they're all scared to put some rockin' beats in their songs because they don't want to get sued. BRING BACK THE SAMPLES, DAMMIT!

Or maybe Mushroom was the real genius in the band.

i like the porno video, but hope that voice over isn't on the album

It's not. That would be bizarre.

that's good to hear , but since you've heard it, how do they fill up those kind of long instrumental sections. Listening again now and realizing underneath the porno talk lies some middling instrumentation. It really works best when Hope sings.

It works fine as long as you're not mentaly superimposing the dialogue. Sounds gorgeous to me. Depends what you consider middling, I guess.

I like it when they hold a solid melody and don't fall into late 90s trip hop territory.

Girl I Love You really is absolutely fucking immense.

A review in this week's New Yorker.

i am surprised about the german reviews. they are all so f*cking positive. that album is a real stinker except girl i love you and the hope sandoval song.

Yeah, I'm surprised by any review that doesn't agree that Girl I Love You and Paradise Circus are on a different plane to the rest of the record. It seems like less a matter of opinion than an objective fact.

On a purely sonic level, I'm enjoying the whole thing. I really like Pray For Rain, just cos I could listen to that drum tone forever.

There's a lot to enjoy sonically but the whole thing, Girl I Love You aside, lacks any kind of compelling drama. Splitting the Atom just kills it stone dead - I don't know what they were trying to do there.

What do you think of 100th Window, Dorian?

well, expecting the worse, this album ain't that bad really. No mindblowing standouts like on their first three album but a pretty consistent sinister cosiness throughout.

I'd say that Girl I Love You is absolutely as mindblowing as anything on the first 3 records.

But yeah, generally I'm far happier with this than I was expecting. Mind you, I was expecting a big bag of donkey bollocks.

Here's the wicked Gui Boratto remix for Paradise Circus (the blogger wrongly attributes the singing to Boratto's wife and, well.. just ignore his blurb).

http://www.themusicninja.com/progressive-house-gui-boratto-no-turning-back-new-massive-attack-paradise-circus-remix/

100th Window is hard to love but there's this wonderful obsessive claustrophobia to it, as if it had been made in Jake Gyllenhaal's flat in Zodiac, with newspaper clippings and mad scribblings pinned to the wall. I love the more electronic tracks, like Small Time Shot Away. But I always loved 3D's rapping and it's a shame he's shifted into unexpressive singing - well, murmuring - instead.

Yeah, that's pretty much how I feel about it. I admire it a lot, for it's form and accomplishment, but I'd only say I 'love' Future Proof.

There are 4 tracks on this new record that I really like, 2 of which I love; that's the same as Mezzanine. Ergo, Heligoland is as good as Mezzanine in Nickland.

That's insane

Hahaha; maybe the stuff I'm not so bothered about on Mezzanine is better than the stuff I'm not so bothered about on Heligoland, but I always thought Mezzanine was massively front-loaded, too long, and samey in the 2nd side.

dissapointed shara nelson wasnt mentioned in the guardian review as one of their best collaborators.

going to try and hear this today.

One of the things I was surprised by when I first started visiting ILX was the apparent general agreement that Mezzanine was the best Massive Attack album. The highs are colossal but, like Nick says, the second side's a trudge. It's still Blue Lines and Protection all the way for me.

shara nelson is weirdly forgotten isn't she! despite featuring on, like, their signature tune. i used to own her two solo albums and i remember them being pretty good.

i <3 mezzanine throughout - the second half has the amazing title track, "man next door" and i probably prefer the fuller-sounding "black milk" and "group four" to "teardrop", as liz fraser collabs go. only track i don't like on it is "exchange" and even that's more unnecessary than dislikeable.

100th Window is hard to love but there's this wonderful obsessive claustrophobia to it

This is very OTM.

Blue Lines is still their best, tho.

I'm probably alone in liking Splitting the Atom, but I think I appreciate it because it's a group cut that kind of shuffles along. 3d's default attitude/song speed seems to be drudging along so it'll never be Karmacoma. There's nothing that really clenches the sound; it's as if the kind of gritty influence Tricky had could make its way in.

You're right, Lex, Man Next Door is astonishing - forgot that was side two. With Girl I Love You I've decided that Horace is the true hero of Massive Attack. He's always there so you take him for granted, and Light My Fire was notoriously horrible, but without him they'd be screwed.

I don't see how anyone could have heard "One Love" off of the first album and not known that Horace Andy was the keystone to Massive Attack from the very beginning.

Group Four is amazing, one of the best tracks on Mezzanine. It does 'desolate' better than anything else in their catalogue. Also, the "to think that I laid next to you wasting time while I could do a simple job" bit is sort of crushing.

I never liked Black Milk very much, it felt kind of rote by that stage of the game.

Actually, forget that, it's Dissolved Girl that was the rote and generic one, not Black Milk.

worth hearing the original(?) Man Next Door by Dennis Brown

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Q87PHE7wYU

what MA do with it is markedly excellent tho

no way, "Dissolved Girl" is a swirly stomping trance monster

i never liked Dissolved Girl much. Black Milk is majestic.

me personally i stopped paying as much attention to MA after the second album/the mad professor remix. they started sounding a lot more cold. though ive recently gone back to those later albums and found theres quite a bit to like, but it did seem they started to try and excise their soul/hip-hop/reggae influences as they went on. so interested to hear the new one if it returns to some of their early influences.

though i find myself fwding through the raps on the first album.

It doesn't return to any of their early influences.