Even by the requirements of a band famous for their unhurried method, Massive Attack’s recorded output has dwindled to a trickle in current years. They’ve seldom been out of the press, however much less as a results of their music than their political campaigning: frontman Robert Del Naja was among the 500 individuals arrested ultimately Saturday’s Palestine Action protest. It is six years since they final launched any new music – a trio of YouTube movies on which their music successfully acted as a soundbed for spoken-word items about world system change – and a decade since they launched one thing you can really purchase, a single referred to as The Spoils. Their most up-to-date album, Heligoland, got here out in 2010: Taylor Swift was nonetheless a nation star, Harry Styles was nonetheless at college, Instagram and TikTok had but to be launched.
It signifies that any new launch robotically carries a sense of occasion, notably in case you’re sufficiently old to recollect how considerably Massive Attack altered the musical panorama of the 90s. You might formulate an argument that their debut album, Blue Lines, was the single most influential British album of its period: it spawned a complete subgenre, trip-hop, in its wake; 35 years on, you may nonetheless hear its echoes in all places, from the mainstream pop of Billie Eilish and Lana Del Rey to the nu-soul of Joy Crookes and Greentea Peng to the countless swathes of nameless “lo-fi beats” that get hundreds of thousands of streams on Spotify.
Of course, it’s a very very long time certainly since Massive Attack’s personal music sounded remotely like Blue Lines: from the late 90s on, their sound broadly grew darker, extra summary and disquieting, extra clearly influenced by spiky post-punk experimentalism than hip-hop or soul – notably if Del Naja, quite than bandmate Grant Marshall, was piloting the music.
This is a state of affairs underlined by Boots on the Ground. Accompanied by a video that includes the work of a documentary photographer who posts on Instagram as thefinaleye – Black Lives Matter protests and the police response to them; ICE raids; homeless veterans – it lasts seven minutes. Almost three of them are consumed by a deeply disconcerting intro and coda consisting solely of the sound of visitor vocalist Tom Waits’s laboured respiratory, as if he’s panting from exhaustion or gasping for air; there’s additionally an equally unsettling burst of full silence 5 minutes in, which provides the impression the monitor is over.
Waits’s presence on Boots on the Ground underlines Massive Attack’s continued capacity to draw blue-chip collaborators. Perhaps that’s one thing to do with the undeniable fact that, from early on in their profession, they appeared to deal with their visitor vocalists much less as stars making cameo appearances than real companions – Tracey Thorn’s presence on 1994’s Protection appeared to form the sound of the complete track; one thing comparable occurred with Elizabeth Fraser on 1998’s Teardrop – and so it proves right here.
Waits apparently submitted his vocal some years in the past, however says in an accompanying quote, usually dark and droll: “Today, as in all of mankind’s yesterdays, guarantees this song will never go out of style.” His vocals are all the time unmistakeable, however his spirit appears to seep into the music: if the beat is a little extra streamlined than you may discover on his later work, it has an ungainly lurch and a trace of arhythmic clatter to it that wouldn’t be solely misplaced on one in all his solo albums. A gently gloomy piano determine floats over it, and there’s a curious interlude the place the rhythm is changed by army snares and vague hymn-like vocals. But your consideration is drawn by Waits’s voice – at its most Beefheartian right here – and what he’s saying. Apparently sung from the viewpoint of a boorish, violent, unbound determine of authority – the sort of aggressor and warmonger so emboldened of late – the lyrics veer between the surreal (“Big titties!”) and the distressing: “I killed a brown man … he choked on his spit and his face turned blue … he died right here, I got the pearl from his snout.”
Clearly, this isn’t a piece of music destined to elbow Massive Attack’s biggest hits – Teardrop, Safe from Harm, Unfinished Sympathy – from individuals’s affections: it is dark, disturbing, ominous, with a distinct streak of WTF? working by way of it. Which makes it music completely becoming for the times.
