b r a n d o n

Massive Attack's blending of dreamy hip-hop beats, lush orchestration, and lazily sung or rapped vocals took the 1990s by storm and basically ended up spawning, as I understand it, the entire subgenre of "trip-hop". In 1998, they released the rather mind-blowing Mezzanine, an album somehow as dark and intense as it was lethargic and sleepy. 100th Window is their fourth album and the followup to Mezzanine, and the relationship between the two is immediately obvious. 100th Window is, if anything, Mezzanine 2, with a similar mood and tone but with less teeth. The slow, creeping darkness is still present, but a lot of the intensity is missing. Absent is the kind of smoldering guitar work from tracks like "Angel" or "Dissolved Girl" that gave much of Mezzanine its bite; where similar guitar playing is present here (as on "Future Proof"), it's buried deep in the mix and often as not sounds superfluous instead of integral to the composition. The lack of live instrumentation tends to give many of the tracks on this album a samey feel; without such timbral variation, the slow, lazy beats tend to dominate everything else. That's not to say that there's not a lot to like about 100th Window. I really enjoy Sinead O'Connor's voice, and it's in fine form here, making "A Prayer for England" especially a standout. Hints of the subtle intensity of Mezzanine can be found scattered throughout, as in "Special Cases" or "Antistar". It's just that the intensity is more, well, distributed, for lack of a better word - more spread around, even more slow-burning than before. The production here ranges from the beautifully symphonic to the abstractly electronic, but it never really breaks out into anything distinctively fresh. 100th Window is a long way from Massive Attack's debut of a dozen years before. I'd be hard-pressed to call it trip-hop anymore, especially as there's no rapping to be found on this album, all of it replaced by hypnotic singing; it's almost ambient/electronica instead. Think Mezzanine combined with the more ambient pieces on Kid A or Amnesiac ("Butterfly Caught" sounds like it could have been an outtake off of either of those albums, with production and blurred-out vocals that blatantly channel Radiohead), and you've got the right idea. I definitely enjoy this album, but I currently consider it to be by far the weakest of Massive Attack's four full-length releases. Prog fans unfamiliar with the group but interested in the idea of trip-hop would be best advised to start with Mezzanine, as this one is a bit too inoffensive and the debut Blue Lines is a bit too hip-hop. review by Brandon Wu — 2-19-03 —