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
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