A Year of Blind Spots: Mezzanine

Mezzanine

Massive Attack

1998

Ignorance is bliss. I miss the days when I could listen to something like this and simply dismiss it as "not for me." That was so much easier. It's hard being challenged, and it feels terrible when I fail to meet the challenge to the best of my abilities. Do I get Massive Attack's trip-hop opus, Mezzanine? Not really. But I find myself diving in further instead of backing away like I used to. This is a good thing—there's value in being open to joy from anywhere and everywhere—but it's also such a pain in the ass. There's no reward here. I am challenged, and I just feel drained afterward. It's tough to imagine that an album that immediately makes me want to put on a different album (i.e. any album that isn't this one) would be considered a "good album," and yet here we are. I think Mezzanine is a good album. And I hate myself for it.

Massive Attack was a blind spot because I had never listened to them, but I was aware of where I'd be headed if I tried to fill that blind spot. I knew that it would complete a sort of triplicate of "electronica" albums that I was sampling this year, after Burial's Untrue and Portishead's Dummy. There are so many differences between these three albums that I'm surprised the true heads aren't busting down my door and stringing me up just for suggesting it. And yet, from my neophyte's perch, I see somewhat sparse electronic music that is totally unfamiliar to me, and I can't help but group them together. If you are a neophyte when it comes to this stuff too, but you've been following along with aYoBS and need some comparisons, then here they are: Mezzanine is less catchy than Dummy, but it is much more coherent than Untrue. All three had an impact on me in the same way, more or less: "this is strange because I don't know it, but in its strangeness I find compelling evidence that I could like this during certain moments of the day or certain days of my life."

I find myself less drawn to the somewhat cliché Mezzanine background story of this being "a work of art so large that it almost broke the band apart." I don't doubt the statement's veracity, I'm just saying that I'm not in a position that that's going to influence me one way or the other. At this point, I get it—recording an album is stressful. That narrative hook hasn't borne fruit since Rumours. I do understand the attempt at explaining this album's legacy and stature, though. It's a dark, grimy, slow, and somewhat ugly piece of work, and yet is at the same time exalted. This just doesn't seem like an album that calls for legendary status, and so I see the "it tore us apart" headline as a course correction.

Not that I'm the fucking expert on any of this. I'm just some jabroni listening to a post-industrial dub album and trying not to drown in the muck and the mire.

Okay, now... the above was written at some point over the past 72 hours. I barely even remember writing it though. It was either late at night or early in the morning. I've been running on empty lately, physically, due to extremely normal ten-month-old sleeping patterns and a possibly errant attempt at fitting in some nice early-morning runs in between, and rereading what I wrote feels like greeting a ghost. Which makes sense, I guess. I'm saying it aligns thematically with the sounds of this album, which is similarly ghostly and creepy. I still don't know if I like it but I'm definitely going to remember it.

Throw in all the usual concerns and caveats. Maybe a week isn't long enough to get to know this music! Maybe I'm not learned enough in this genre to know what I'm talking about! The former is unavoidable; the latter subsides only after repeated listen to music like this, and I don't necessarily think that's a given. I don't think it's my job to be an expert in this column; I'm just here to let you know what to expect. If you wanna find something new, then you can definitely find it in Mezzanine, something that is at once cryptic and unseemly and transformative.