Massive Attack

Massive Attack were the Bristol nucleus from which the trip-hop movement sprang. The collective (more than a band) coined a kind of dance music that, instead of being deafening, tribal, and lush like disco, was soft, atmospheric, and sparse. This music drew on at least two musical backgrounds: psychedelic and reggae. The psychedelic revival of the 1980s brought back hallucinatory atmospheres and surreal orchestrations. Reggae DJs, in turn, had left behind the dub technique, which initially was anything but danceable, but when combined with psychedelic inspiration, became the foundation for the new dance music.

DJ Grantley "Daddy G" Marshall left reggae to create a sound system collective called Wild Bunch. The difference from the dance music of the time was the nihilistic and anarchic ethos of punk. The rapper Robert "3-D" del Naja and drum machine operator Andrew "Mushroom" Vowles soon joined the group. The Wild Bunch (whose first single came out in 1986) fueled the "acid warehouse" movement, which quickly spread around Bristol. The singer Nellee Hooper was also part of it, before moving on to Soul II Soul. The other three members of the collective formed Massive Attack together with singer Shara Nelson.

The hypnotic beat of dub blends with Nelson’s languid and sensual vocalizations on the group’s manifesto, Blue Lines (Circa, 1991). In Safe From Harm one feels the influence of Isaac Hayes’ symphonic soul, and the singer showcases her sensual, passionate scat, halfway between Tina Turner and Donna Summer. Unfinished Sympathy is a mini avant-garde concert in which seemingly dissonant sonic events overlap, yet are seamlessly integrated through a song theory that relies on groove.
Massive Attack seem to focus particularly on rap, which enriches the tracks in various ways: the female vocals instead become a simple instrument in Daydreaming, and Five Man Army carries a reggae fanfare. The album closes on the epic tones of that hybrid of reggae and gospel that is Hymn Of The Big Wheel (sung by reggae legend Horace Andy), by far the most melodic track on the album. All tracks feature carefully crafted lounge-style arrangements (or, more accurately, bedroom arrangements). By mixing reggae, funk, and soul, the ensemble achieves a visionary result, even if not highly musical (too many tracks endlessly toy with elementary ideas). Many charting soul singers had done similar things for thirty years, but Massive Attack did it when technology allowed them to shift gears. On the surface were the traditional genres of black popular music, but underneath were avant-garde sampling and mixing. On the surface was the same "blues" (in the broad sense), languid and melancholy, that Billie Holiday sang at the start of the century, but beneath it was a maniacal work of sonic subversion. The soft, dreamlike backdrops that turn these tracks into a kind of existential meditation made Massive Attack famous, at least as producers. The artistic aspect would later be developed, a few years on, mainly by Geoff Barrow’s group, the humble sound engineer: the Portishead.

Nelson also achieved success with her solo album What Silence Knows (Cooltempo, 1994), which contains three hits (Down That Road, Inside Out, One Goodbye In Ten) in a classic rhythm and blues style. Another member of the collective had also started a solo career: Tricky.

The success of their protégés, Portishead, brought Massive Attack back into the recording studio. Replacing Nelson with a parade of exceptional guest artists, the style of Protection (Virgin, 1994) is increasingly relaxed, now far removed from the frenzy of techno, often bordering on narcotic, almost always in a minor key. The sound of tracks like Sly is clear, slippery, and ambiguous, aware of the sumptuous orchestral soul of the 1970s. The rap on Eurochild, however, is loaded with urban angst, and Karmacoma is hypnotic reggae. Fully conscious, almost narcissistic, of their role as trailblazers, the group takes itself too seriously, forgetting that much of their music (the title track, Weather Storm) drifts into light cocktail-lounge soul that had been around for at least thirty years.

Mezzanine (Virgin, 1998) is their most aggressive and darkest album, and perhaps their best overall. What sounded unfocused or incomplete on the previous records, here is perfectly shaped and choreographed. The expressionist angst of ballads such as Risingson (industrial beat, booming dub-style reverb, syncopated drumming, zombie-esque vocals) and instrumentals such as Exchange (dreamy pace, jazzy bass, a could of strings hovering over the fluttering keyboards) amounts to a refounding of trip hop, more "trip" than "hop". Horace Andy sings Angel, a solemn vertigo of depression worthy of Joy Division replete with majestic keyboards, funereal bass, neurotic guitar strumming and hypnotic beat. The mood of Man Next Door is almost gothic, decadent, desperate, stradling the border between Cure and David Bowie.
Liz Fraser of Cocteau Twins delivers the gentle and ethereal madrigal Teardrop, replete with baroque harpsichord and bass deep piano knells, and the lengthy, Indian-sounding Group Four, a sort of ambient raga, the tender hymn stretched over a crowded soundscape of little tones and samples.
The eerily romantic soul-jazz ballad Black Milk and the frantic middle-eastern dance with soothing vocals Inertia Creeps return to their classic sound, albeit in a darker and somber variant.
As usual, each song is a calculated gamble on complex rhythms and sophisticated keyboard arrangements. However, here the "intelligence" of the sound is serving a disturbing motive, has psychological roots, rather than being mere food for chic dancing.
Massive Attack has learned how to estrange dance music from its roots, how to redeem the detail in the context of a whole, how to turn a ludic act into an intellectual act. The research of British masters such as Peter Gabriel, David Sylvian, Kate Bush and Brian Eno is transposed into the slow, mellow structures of soul-derived dance music. Just like with the masters, the resulting harmony propels a soundtrack of urban alienation.

The singles of Massive Attack have been collected on Singles 90/98 (Virgin, 1998).

Vowles left the group at the end of 1998.

100th Window (Virgin, 2003), the first Massive Attack album in five years, was recorded by a new line-up that features only one of the band's original members, Robert "3D" Del Naja (plus vocal contributions by Sinead O'Connor and Jamaican crooner Horace Andy). The sound has become more textural, atmospheric, ambient and electronic. The bad news is that too many tracks meander pointlessly. The so so news is that the "band" is at least capable of an elegant, stylish routine in the seven-minute impeccable ballad Everywhen, What Your Soul Sings and Special Cases. The real good news is that the psychedelic element is brought to the forefront in Future Proof (all distortion and Eastern undulating), Butterfly Caught (another lengthy track) and closer Antistar, the most experimental pastiche here; and despite the drawbacks of these songs (none of which is as perfectly orchestrated as Everywhen) Massive Attack has not yet been reduced to a sleeping pill.

Danny The Dog (2004) is a (terrible) film soundtrack. Bullet Boy (2005) and Splitting the Atom (2009) were transitional EPs.

Heligoland (2010), with guest vocals from Damon Albarn, Hope Sandoval, Martina Topley-Bird and others, abandoned trip-hop and veered towards post-rock (Flat of the Blade) and slo-core (Paradise Circus); but its stylistic metamorphoses were largely driven by the guest vocalists, not by sincere songwriting strategy.

Massive Attack didn't vanish: it kept releasing material, but sporadically and only on EPs such as Ritual Spirit (2016) and Eutopia (2020).

As a graffiti artist, Robert "3D" Del Naja has been mentioned as a major influence by Bristol's stencil artists Banksy, and Bansky stencil art has frequently appeared in places where Massive Attack were performing.