The 1990s in 10 Albums: Mezzanine (1998)

You can see a man’s face, but you can never know his thoughts.

When I first bought Mezzanine in late 2005 (being, of course, at the bleeding edge of popular culture), I found something marvellous in the liner notes: credits for vocals, guitar, bass and drums, none of them for members of Massive Attack. An entire rock album happens on this, and Massive Attack aren’t actually said band.

So what did Massive Attack do on this album? “Everything else” is the trite answer, although “everything else” was also, by 1998, quite an expansive one too. The end of the 1990s was the end of tape recording, for better or worse, and by the end of the 2000s songs were more constructed than recorded for many artists.

This proved great for some genres, such as hip-hop, but terrible for rock music, where looping one good take of a riff instead playing an entire guitar track leads to obvious and (more importantly) detrimental artifice. Massive Attack, being (on this album) somewhere between those genres, manages the best of both worlds.

“Angel” is a great demonstration of this, not least because it isn’t pretending to be a standard verse-chorus arrangement (indeed, very little of Mezzanine has discernible choruses). It’s based around three movements, seamlessly integrated; a dark, ominous intro, a steady buildup, and a grim, apocalyptic climax, which sinks back into the swamp from which the song emerged.

“Risingson” is a similar, if slightly lesser effort, sandwiched between the opener and “Teardrop”.

“Teardrop”, of course, is the single that took off, Massive Attack’s only top 10 UK hit and gaining a second life as more-or-less the theme tune to House. After the claustrophobia of the previous 11 minutes, it’s a relief. “Inertia Creeps” rounds out the opening quartet of tracks.

“Act Two” of the album is a little weaker. “Exchange” is a breather, sure, but it’s also the first track to get remotely close to being elevator music (it doesn’t help that it’s a quiet instrumental). “Dissolved Girl” provides new energy and viciousness, although its lyrics (“Feels like I’ve been/I’ve been here before/You’re not my saviour”) ended up accidentally being heavy-handed when deployed in The Matrix.

Those early scenes in the film, however, almost perfectly describe this album — grimy, somewhat ill-looking, although the green tinge differs from the gunmetal, greyscale world of Mezzanine. The paranoia here is one of a city of endless residential high-rises, roving gangs, a relentless grey sky. The police, like the Agents of The Matrix, are relentless, but no help and little better compared to the criminals and arsonists in every block.

Not to mention the wife-beaters. “Man Next Door” is a little marred by Horace Andy’s pronunciation of “fight” as “fart”, and domestic violence from the perspective of a neighbour who has to put up with it is a tiny bit questionable. It remains a powerful song, though, because like much of the album, it doesn’t attempt to over-explain. “Black Milk” also illustrates this; “You’re not my eater/Our blood, your food” is really all that’s needed to establish the vampiric tone. It’s also the most hip-hop influenced track on the album, the turntablisms attempting to scratch out — or at least scratch over — the terrible reality the lyrics evoke.

“Act Three” starts off with the title track, which evokes “Inertia Creeps”; except, where that song’s circling loops suggested the radio waves of the lyrics, here the burping basslines imply being trapped in the belly of the beast. “Group Four” suggests a way out, a light shining down from Liz Fraser’s echoing vocals, but in the end, the storm of guitars sweep in; the endless grey clouds of the aforementioned urban landscape have broken, a solid rain arrives with the approaching night. In the end, all that’s left is Horace Andy’s admonition in the reprised “(Exchange)”: “You can see a man’s face/But you can never know his thoughts”.

This is really the key phrase of the album. The US Embassy attacks in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam occurred within months of the album’s release, and by the time 100th Window (2003) arrived, Western society was paranoid enough to justify Mezzanine’s tone.

Yet 100th Window just isn’t on the same level as an album. For one, it felt more constructed, as an album; Mezzanine, despite being also Pro Tool’d to the extreme. The move to digital presented new opportunities, but maybe the old certainties became harder to cling to, for better or worse.