Pioneering British electronic act Massive Attack has finally released the follow-up to 1998’s critically acclaimed Mezzanine. The new album, 100th Window, is a disappointing record that tries in vain to recreate Mezzanine’s sound.
That sound was a sensual mix of slowed-down hip-hop beats, throbbing, insistent bass lines and the occasional foray into churning storms of guitar. It sounds like a description of a headache, but it is quite beautiful, and Massive Attack combined this unique sound with simple, breathy vocals to foment a nice, brooding angst, something we can all relate to. Pretty much every band claims at some point to sound like the future; Mezzanine, by virtue of sounding completely different yet feeling so familiar, actually convinced a lot of people that it was genuinely ahead of its time, a sneak preview. Enter hordes of vastly inferior imitators, and exit the three members of Massive Attack, who avoided one another for several years, reuniting occasionally for brief periods of bitter infighting.
With the release of 100th Window, MA’s lineup, always engaged in slow tripartite evolution, has shriveled on the vine, leaving only Robert Del Naja, the man most often credited with creating Mezzanine’s sound. Unfortunately, Del Naja failed to follow his one rule: always do something stunningly new. If Massive Attack is anything, it is sexy science fiction fantasy-one of the finer songs off Mezzanine was used in 1999’s ubiquitous techno-thriller The Matrix-and relentless change is its forte.
That said, imitating Mezzanine’s style isn’t a total mistake. The magic is still hard to resist, partly because all attempts at matching its detailed intensity have failed. Consequently, Window is an album out of place. It doesn’t define a radically new sound, as MA’s previous releases have, but instead echoes, with varying success, an album that no one has yet figured out how to respond to. If you can get over the tragic stagnation of Massive Attack’s creativity, 100th Window isn’t all that bad. Nothing new, but an occasionally passable reiteration of Mezzanine’s themes, which basically amount to ruminations on loneliness.
The opener, a pretty vocal number called “Future Proof,” is about as strong as the album gets, and owes a major debt to the thum-thump heartbeat bass of Mezzanine’s “Angel.” Most of the other high points on Window come courtesy of reggae vocalist Horace Andy, a Massive Attack regular. “Name Taken” is one such song, as the pure, yearning tremolo of Andy’s voice gets just enough room to breathe. The track includes a few of the elegantly simple dynamic shifts that Del Naja developed on Mezzanine; the chief weakness is that he doesn’t take those shifts far enough. He plays with the song’s structure, pitching the energy up and down, but the track enters its sixth minute only having taken half a step away from its original shape.
A smattering of mediocre tracks round out the rest of the album. Some feature the poorly-chosen vocal stylings of Sinead O’Connor, and some are limited to Del Naja’s own inarticulate muttering. O’Connor’s voice simply doesn’t fit the Massive Attack pattern. Every other vocalist who has worked with the band has had a voice so clean that it stands proudly on its own when surrounded by nothing but a smattering of percussion and a bass growl. O’Connor’s pop croon isn’t up to the task, and the record suffers because of it. Del Naja, who has made frequent appearances on Massive Attack records as one of many mumbling guys with an impenetrable accent, is somehow out of his element on Window, despite the fact that it is basically his solo record. In the past, his paranoid growl was a fine foil to the vocalists on center stage, but the trick has worn off, and he doesn’t sound world-weary so much as he just sounds tired. Hopefully he’ll take the cue and give up the game, because 100th Window is the work of a band in decline with nowhere to go but down.
