Published on Aug 12, 2004
With every album, Massive Attack explores a new and unexplored
territory, still maintaining the inherent spookiness, which is so
true to their style.
100th Window, like every new Massive Attack album, ventures
into another strange direction of another facet of their strange
imagination. Bleak, it is, but
100th Window does allow a little bit of sunshine in its
abode, unlike its predecessor, the eerily disturbing and distraught
Mezzanine.
Unlike the previous albums,
100th Window has the drum-machine used quite generously in
places, and the trip-hop sluggishness of this album gets an
‘electronica’ tinge, giving its reptilian feel a blush. As a matter
of fact, since the band revisits its more accessible sounds with
100th Window, it has a much more amiable feel to it, and is
more musical than
Mezzanine, which was more inclined to creating a spooky
aura.
Much less trippy in nature,
100th Window wanders into the new blend of Brit alt art-pop,
that bands like Radiohead, Clinic and Broadcast have been into,
lately. As a matter of fact, the distorted vocals of singer Robert
Del Naja on “Small Time Shot Away” sounds a lot like Thom Yorke in
“Everything’s In The Right Place,” from Radiohead’s
Kid A: a perfect exemplar of this neoteric blend of Brit
gloom pop.
With Sinead O’ Connor being the female vocal accompaniment for
this latest Massive Attack project, her songs on
100th Window are more driven with feminine power and fire,
rather than feminine tenderness and demureness, which Elizabeth
Fraser had imparted in her songs, on the predecessor
Mezzanine. No longer as angry as she was before, Sinead is
more pensive in her collaboration with Massive Attack. But, her
vocals still make a strong presence on this album, in contrast to
that of the rather tranquilized vocals Robert Del Naja and Horace
Andy, the other vocalists on
100th Window. With Grant Marshall and Andrew Vowels missing
from the present Massive Attack line-up,
100th Window is devoid of Massive Attack’s trademark spooky
rap, and as a matter of fact, there is no rap at all on this
album!
Amidst the downcast in the album’s feel, there is positivity,
which comes mainly from Sinead’s vocals, in “What Your Soul Sings,”
in which she plaintively sings, “Don’t be afraid / open your mouth
and say / say what your soul sings to you / and when you do /
you’ll find the one you need is you / you’ll find you, love you.”
And, in a more advising tone, sings “the deadliest of sin is
pride-makes you think that you’re always right-but there are always
two sides…there are many good men-thank your lucky stars
that he is one of them” in the gothic “Special Cases.”
Along with drugged gloom, sensuality had always been a quality
of Massive Attack’s music, and who better to provide it, than
Horace Andy’s seemingly seamy vocals. “Everywhen,” with its
addictive piano-hook, one of Massive Attack’s most tender numbers,
has Horace singing his best and sleaziest collaboration with
Massive, of course only after the eternally raunchy “One Love”
(from
Blue Lines). Also, the beautifully programmed
orchestra-laden “Butterfly Caught,” with its melancholy and
vulnerability, shows the insecurity of this band, with an undertone
of unfulfilled urges.
100th Window is the very first Massive Attack album with the
complete band line-up missing. Notwithstanding, this LP still has
retained the distinctive Massive Attack eeriness and sensuousness.
Though incomplete, the band is still as talented as it had always
been, and
100th Window, like every other Massive Attack album, shows
why this band has been one of the best of the present
generation.