FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1998 All Rights Reserved.
| COVER STORY Massive Attack's new CD Guilt is something that pervades almost every part of the North American Christian lifestyle. Guilt for not having enough, for having too much, for not sharing, for eating, spending, drinking, fucking, sleeping, getting high - you name it. Not to get all Footloose on you, but for the longest time the last bastion of guilt-free living for many was the dancefloor. (That is, of course, if you danced.) It was the special happy place where the external was internalized and all was good. With the exception of those few freaks among us who found something in Kraftwerk or Skinny Puppy to convulse to, dancing was done to keep the darkness from encroaching, not to welcome its envelopment. It's fitting, then, that someone would find a way to ink-blot out the strobe stars and make the dance experience as dark as what lurks inside us all. When Massive Attack burst out of Bristol eight years ago it was the beginning of a movement that aimed to give guilt a dance beat. In its shadow grew popular acts such as Portishead, Hooverphonic and ex-MA collaborator Tricky. Call it trip hop, call it black ambient techno pop, call it whatever you want, the result was a dense, albeit beautiful, externalized internal fog of darkness filling the floor and its inhabitants. "We don't necessarily deliberately try to make the tracks melancholic or moody," explains Daddy G (aka Grant Marshall), one-third of the Massive Attack core. "But for some reason when we get in the studio that's always the way that they seem to turn out, quite sort of deep. The word 'dark' is always poppin' up now - it's a bit of a buzz word - but maybe texture, I like to say. There's a lot more texture to it. "The way that we work, the fact that quite a lot of the tracks are quite personal to each other, to each of us, they're initiated by one member of the band and once you've initiated something you want to see the thing to the end. It's hard to let go of the track to involve other ideas from other people. So I think a lot of tensions are kept within each of us trying to follow our ideas through with a track "It hasn't all been easy, there's a lot of struggles to trying to get your ideas across, especially when you've only got 12 inches of plastic or a CD to get it on," he says. "Because we've got to get this thing out and working, it's condensed within a little space so you feel claustrophobic and sometimes the music comes across as being that way, as well. Suffocating in a way. Personal experience dictates how things are done." Daddy G, Mushroom (Andrew Vowles), and Robert del Naja (3D) are just letting the paint dry on their third darkly textured CD, Mezzanine, which will be released later this month in Britain and early May in North America. Produced by the band and Neil Davidge, it's another crushed velvet eyepatch with dizzying intoxicants to get your head nodding enough to free your ass to follow. Heady stuff, indeed. And in the quicksand of their gloom, Massive Attack have once again sunk the gorgeous vocals of some of music's finest femmes: Horace Andy, whose magnificent reggae vox was featured on the two previous records; newcomer Sara Jay; and ex-Cocteau Twin Elizabeth Fraser, whom Daddy G admits to be a "pet love" they wanted to use on 1994's sophomore CD Protection. (They instead used Tracey Thorn from Everything But the Girl.) The latter recruitment is probably the most inspired - Fraser's incomparable and uplifting siren song on three of the album's 11 tracks is the perfect foil for the band's dance dirges. Exploiting the foreboding beauty and beguile of the female voice is something that has worked tremendously well for Massive Attack (they even worked with Madonna on the track "I Want You" from the Marvin Gaye Tribute Album), and it, besides the murk of the music, is the one trait that seems to define the genre they begat. At least it's the one thing the band's imitators seem to focus in on. Of those who've reaped the rewards of absconding with their sound, the trio are nothing if not charitable. "The bottom line is we've taken influences from other people as well," G says. "Okay, so we created the blueprint for something that people have followed on with. We're not trying to be one step ahead of everybody else, it's the case that we're just trying to be one step ahead of ourselves." Fraser aside, the big difference on Mezzanine, according to G, is the move from the sample-based work of their first album towards an equilibrium between studio sound and live sound. That middle ground is something that has materialized naturally through demands that the band, and DJ culture in general, embrace the pop world's ideas on image and identity. As the audiences for the music and the money it fetches have grown, those behind the board have had to abandon anonymity in favor of adulation. Surprisingly, it's something which Massive Attack welcome rather than bemoan. "Because everything is so product-based nowadays it's a case that if you've got your product, you've got to go out and sell it. People want to see a face behind the product. With us we could have remained anonymous, but the thing is we decided that at the end of day we want the record to be successful, we want to make a statement with it. And the only way you do that is by getting behind your music and actually going out to the public and introducing them to it. Playing the game, really, in a way," he admits. "It's a natural progression for us, really. This is something we wanted to do, we didn't want to stay in the studio and make studio-based music to sell to a limited audience." And that's really nothing to feel guilty about now, is it? |