Massive Attack - "Mezzanine" (1998)

I have known and loved Massive Attack's most famous song, Teardrop, for years, but would have been stumped to identify any other songs from the trip hop pioneers. As I've been delving into more of the genre this year (trip hop playlists make for good background music to work too), I took the time to listen to its parent album, Mezzanine. This hour long collection of spacious and subtle electronic mood-pieces ebb and flow from tense and claustrophobic, to relaxed and laid-back. I wouldn't say it is as much a chill-out album as other trip hop releases, but it certainly has a real late-night vibe to it.

The album opens with Angel, a track I would have previously recognised from edgy perfume adverts on at Christmas. It opens with a rumbling bass-line and rattling hi-hats. Ominous sound effects and some enchanting vocals join the mix, ramping up the tension as the bass becomes more prominent. All this tension is released as a whining guitar floods in with the vocals repeating "Love you, love you, love you...". The next track, Risingson, is far less cathartic, sounding very industrial and alien. The vocals on this track just have this creepy non-emotional quality to them, which combined with the mechanical beats of the track make it feel so off-kilter and alien.

Teardrop follows this, and couldn't be further from the inhumanity of Risingson. The song features real gut-punching chord progressions as Cocteau Twins' Elizabeth Fraser soars above them with some beautiful vocals. She was inspired to write the lyrics after the death of her friend (and excellent musician and songwriter) Jeff Buckley, and you can really feel the grief and pain in her voice. Once again, this emotion is punctuated by the return of the more intense and industrial Inertia Creeps. This song isn't as alien as Risingson, with a thunderous drum beat and mantra like hook of "Moving up slowly, inertia creeps". The guitars which come in at various points of the song and the beat inspired by Turkish Tsifteteli rhythms give the track a dirty and dangerous atmosphere. Exchange gives the first real breather in the album, a purely instrumental cut which is straight out of some beach-side bar on some Mediterranean coast. It is such a chilled song, with a bouncy bass and some gliding keyboard notes on top.

The tracks on the second half of the record aren't quite as contrasting or stand out from each-other quite as much as they do in the first half, but seep into each other to build a real moody atmosphere. Dissolved Girl's sensual but sarcastic vocals from Sarah Jay Hawley and wild guitar which breaks out midway through give it a Garbage-esque vibe that I really do enjoy. Man Next Door is built around a sample of the iconic drum riff in Led Zeppelin's When The Levee Breaks, but it is twisted and mutated into something more distant and spacious than the thunderous drumming in the original. This is combined with a sample of the Cure's 10:15 Saturday Night, to make a strange groovy instrumental base for the cover of an originally reggae song to sit on top of.

Black Milk is a very gentle song which sees the return of Fraser's soothing vocals. The track doesn't explode or change up, so acts as nice breathing room after the groovy Man Next Door. The title track returns to the emotionless vocals of Risingson, but with sparser instrumentation, with makes the track feel very tense and restrictive. This leads into Group Four, a similarly sparse song, yet Fraser's vocals contrast the rest of the song, being smooth and angelic. This really juxtaposes against DJ Ninja's mechanical and methodical vocals on the track. The album closes with a reprise of Exchange (titled (Exchange)), with added vocals. This almost acts as a wind-down for the tension built up across the second half, allowing it to dissipate as the soft keyboard note glide along.

Mezzanine is fantastic, start to finish, maintaining a consistent tone yet covering so many styles within the 12 tracks. It is very much an album just to sit back and take it all in. That being said, particularly the tracks on the first half can stand very much on their own in isolation. This might be the best entry point into this side of electronic music I've come across, being that I loved this on first listen, where things like Portishead's Dummy and the more electronic side of Radiohead took longer to sink their teeth into me.

Top Tracks: Angel, Risingson, Teardrop, Inertia Creeps, Exchange, Dissolved Girl, Man Next Door, Black Milk

9/10

Coldplay - "Everyday Life" (2019)

Coldplay have had a pretty underwhelming decade compared to the 2000s, all things considered. They kicked things off with 2011's Mylo Xyloto, a pop rock concept album that I will defend more than most, however it was probably their weakest release at that time. They then followed this up with the sombre break-up album, 2014's Ghost Stories, which won some people back with its moodiness more akin to the bands earlier albums. However, the weak writing and incredibly stiff, lifeless instrumentation and production make this by far my least favourite Coldplay release. Just a year later, they then moved onto A Head Full of Dreams, which stepped further into pop than Mylo Xyloto, and returned some of the colour which was so devoid in Ghost Stories. The last we heard from the band was the 2017 Kaleidoscope EP, a project that contained a mix of the typical safe, radio-friendly Coldplay tracks and a couple of weirder, less mainstream ones which hearkened back to some of their more ambitious work from the 2000s. So I had a feeling that whatever the band was going to do next, it wasn't going to be just 'A Head Full of Dreams 2'.

And that is exactly what happened. Everyday Life is a double album that takes influence from world music, showing the bands artier side that hasn't really seen much light since Viva La Vida in 2008. The two halves are titled Sunrise and Sunset and deal with far more global and political topics that Coldplay are generally know for.

Sunrise opens with its title track, a beautiful short string piece which sounds like it would accompany a sunrise quite perfectly. This leads into Church, a relaxed, sunny tune with Chris Martin's joyous vocals floating above a shuffling drum beat and chiming guitar. It's the first of many religious references within the album, and certainly the best of them. Trouble In Town takes a turn away from the serene atmosphere of the album so far, starting as a very moody, Latin inspired tune about police violence. The back half of the song explodes into this Radiohead-like frenzy while an audio clip of some police violently harassing someone is added to the mix. The other truly fantastic song on the Sunrise half (and my favourite from the entire album) is Arabesque, a song built around this French-pop groove as Martin sings about how we 'share the same blood', even singing in French for a verse. A stomping Nigerian brass band then enter the tune, giving it this massive sounding quality as it builds to the climax where Martin drops his first ever F-bomb in a Coldplay song.

The rest of the first half is fine, if completely unremarkable. BrokEn is a bog standard gospel song, WOTW/POTP (standing for Wonders Of The World/Power Of The People) is a cute but clearly unfinished acoustic song in desperate need for a memorable hook, and Daddy is as about as awkwardly soppy as Coldplay have ever been. Sunrise concludes with When I Need A Friend, a song done in the style of traditional church hymns, and for me this style just sucks the life out of the track, making it sound pretty uninteresting to me.

Sunset, unlike the first half, doesn't have a title track; instead opening with Guns, a sarcastic tune where Martin lists off plenty of the worlds injustices (including America's apparent love for solving their gun problem with more guns) while he strums his acoustic guitar so ferociously it starts to go out of tune by the short track's end. I love the intensity of this track, but I think it could've done with another pass as its chorus of Martin declaring everything is crazy and he might be crazy too creates a fair amount of tonal dissonance within the song. The album's big single, Orphans, also suffers from this. The track is literally about teenagers who have lost their homes and everything in the war in Syria, yet features a typical Coldplay party chorus about just wanting to get drunk with their friends (complete with millennial whoops and all). Cry Cry Cry is a cringy faux-retro doo-wop tune complete with fake vinyl crackles, and is half finished to say the least. Old Friends is much better, a sentimental, simple but effective acoustic tune that gives me Parachutes vibes.

The last two tracks are far more complete than much of whats on the Sunset half, and do seem to give the album some direction in its latter stages. Champion Of The World is a song dedicated to Frightened Rabbit singer, Scott Hutchinson, and I appreciate the intent of the song but it isn't Martin's strongest set of lyrics, so the track lands in this awkward sense of sentimentality but also being too generic to truly resonate. Everyday Life, the closer and overall title track, also falls into this trap, as the songs message basically amounts to 'why can't everyone just be nice to each other'. Not that is inherently a bad thing (much of the Beatles' music amounted to the same), but here Coldplay just don't quite land it.

Everyday Life is certainly the bands messiest album. It goes in loads of different musical directions, and attempts to address some massive themes and ideas with a tracklist that is full of half finished songs. However, the musical concepts the band has been going for in this one is much more to my tastes than the squeaky clean pop of 'A Head Full Of Dreams' and the stiff electronics of 'Ghost Stories', making it a much more enjoyable listen even if those albums were more polished and carefully constructed. I'm also glad that the band is prioritising their own artistic ambitions over commercial appeal, and despite Everyday Life's faults I'm exited for whatever they do next.

Top Tracks: Sunrise, Church, Trouble In Town, Arabesque, Guns, Old Friends

6/10