Review of the week: Massive Attack, Olympia, Dublin * * * *
Friday October 09 2009
It's over a decade since Massive Attack were at the cutting edge and today their dense, druggy beats and paranoid mutterings feel curiously weather-beaten and as distinctively 90s as Britpop and footage of Bill Clinton in the White House.
Clearly, it's a state of affairs that troubles these one-time innovators no end. At The Olympia, Robert "3D" Del Naja and Grant "Big Daddy" Marshall, accompanied by a flotilla of keyboardists, guitarists and singers, open with four unfamiliar compositions, each telling a story of diminishing returns and barrels scraped dry (a fifth studio album is due early next year, but nobody seems terribly eager to hear the new material).
Nevermind, there's a mesmerising light display that crackles with political invective without ever lapsing, Bono-style, into empty grandstanding. During 16 Seeter, for instance, the cost of keeping a third world family alive is flashed poignantly in minimalist LED alongside a list of British MPs' expenses (throw in the cost of one of John O'Donoghue's jollies to Paris and the screen would probably have exploded). It takes iconic Jamaican vocalist Horace Andy, a regular on all of Massive Attack's LPs, to cut through the fog of dull worthiness. Babel, a middling Massive Attack track, is transformed by Andy's sweet, man-siren croon and his karmic stage presence.
Thereafter, Del Naja and Marshall wisely flip into greatest hits mode. Risingson sounds like Radiohead trapped in a blender with Nine Inch Nails; Teardrop, with vocals from Martina Topley-Bird, is re-imagined as a minimalist dirge.
There are only two excerpts from their era-defining 1991 debut, Blue Lines. Del Naja, a Bristol-native who is to neurotic muttering what Pavarotti was to tenor singing, mumbles something baffling about the 'Irish Free State' by way of introducing Safe From Harm; featuring stunning lead vocals from Deborah Miller, Unfinished Sympathy -- their very first hit -- has lost none of its bruised, fragile majesty.
A three-song encore saw them looking to the future as well as the past. The strangely jaunty Splitting the Anthem, from a new EP, brings Topley-Bird and Andy together on vocals, yet is otherwise forgettable. The same, however, cannot be said of Karmacoma, a disorienting power-rap from 1996, with beats that sink into your skull like metal talons. Massive Attack's future as boundary breakers may be uncertain but when their past is this glorious, it seems hardly to matter.
- Ed Power
Irish Independent
