People often ask me what’s the greatest album ever.* Friends, I’m here to settle that question for us all, once and for all.
Ok, that’s about the lamest and most flippant intro ever to (dis)grace this album. But to put it simply, nothing I can find to say can even begin to translate this experience into words. (I feel a bit like Sam in this scene from the extended version of The Fellowship of the Ring. And yes, I am somewhat of a Lord of the Rings nerd. And, cool trivia: the primary vocalist in the Lament for Gandalf track that plays in the clip I just linked to is Elizabeth Fraser, who contributed absolutely stunning vocals for three of the tracks on Mezzanine, perhaps most notably Black Milk.)
In short, I just can’t pull off one of those slick Rolling Stone-esque write ups here, because those seem woefully inadequate too (though here’s a decent one from Sasha Geffen, and yeah, my first exposure to Massive Attack was indeed in The Matrix, as she suggests). So I’ll just shut up now and beg you to listen to Massive Attack’s Mezzanine. And then repeat, again and again and again. One of my deepest and most long-standing artistic dreams is to make an album length “music video” (for lack of a better term) for Mezzanine, so with any luck I’ll share news about that here some day.
*No, actually they don’t.
