Massive Attack
'100th Window'
Massive Attack see through a glass darkly.
But don't tell that to Grant "Daddy G" Marshall, Robert "3D" Del Naja, and Andrew "Mushroom" Vowles. In the '80s, they ran with Bristol, England, hip-hop crew the Wild Bunch, who pretty much were the British rap scene back then. After the Bunch splintered, the trio formed Massive Attack; and since then, they've gotten little credit as British hip-hop torchbearers, even though their slow-mo beats swaggered like Shaft and their MCs managed to make the Queen's English flow. Stuck on orchestral soul and dub reggae, they seemed too mongrel, too alien to share a genre with Def Jam types. So their debut, Blue Lines, got filed under "trip-hop," and its ambient soul cast a decade-long shadow (see Moby, who built a cottage industry out of "Unfinished Sympathy").
Follow-ups Protection and Mezzanine codified the Massive formula: lushly stoned MC tracks, some sage lovers' rock by reggae vet Horace Andy, a freelance-diva number or two. The menu is the same on 100th Window, but this is a very different Massive Attack. With Mushroom gone and Daddy G on "sabbatical," this is effectively a 3D solo joint. And few will read it as hip-hop.
At this point, 3D is the elder, English equivalent of New York indie-rap hero El-P--a paranoid rhymer, mad sound scientist, and creative megalomaniac whom you suspect spends too much time at home sparking blunts and surfing conspiracy-theory websites like whatreallyhappened.com (among the many poli-sci links currently spotlighted at massiveattack.com). 100th Window--named for a book on computer snooping--is the sound of a solitary man succumbing to his laptop's siren song. Test tones, the suck of a ventilator shaft, furnace turbines, and distant guitar feedback eddy and sputter, blanketing abstract, dystopian verse. "Chemicals captured in winter's grip turn us on / Separate the leper / Hungry ghost," 3D murmurs, sounding as uncomfortably numb as Radiohead's Thom Yorke circa Kid A.
Elsewhere, Horace Andy becomes a dub poltergeist on two tracks that unspool like experimental films, while diva duties go to Sinéad O'Connor, who's lately been moonlighting as both a techno-house hook queen and a folkie modernist (check her work with Moby and Conjure One for the former, her dub-wise Sean-N#243;s Nua for the latter). It's a sound choice: O'Connor's barbed Enya-isms fit the album's antsy chill-out vibe, and her sermon on "A Prayer for England"--which beseeches Jah to save the children--is as reassuring, in its own way, as Jigga praising his own mic skills.
100th Window is a masterpiece of haunted sonics. But the spirit of community that once warmed this band's angsty soul is missing. Even the deep Arabic fusions of "Anti-Star" and "Butterfly Caught"--gestures of cultural solidarity from a group who briefly changed their name to Massive in the early '90s to protest the Gulf War and who've spoken out against the current saber-rattling in the Mideast--sound menacing. Maybe there'll be more light on the record's follow-up, which will reportedly feature Daddy G along with such guests as Mos Def, Faith No More screamer Mike Patton, and Tom Waits. Note to 3D: If old-school émigré Slick Rick really gets deported back to England, ring him up. It's never too late to rewrite history.
