In a recent interview, Massive Attack's Daddy G claimed dubstepper Burial might remix the entire forthcoming Massive Attack album the same way Mad Professor remixed Protection on No Protection a decade and a half ago. That's a great look for Massive Attack; Burial's moody skitter-fog should mesh beautifully with Massive Attack's heady creep. But if the teaser EP Splitting the Atom is any indication, that Burial remix joint will probably make a better and more convincing Massive Attack album than the next actual Massive Attack album.
That's not really a surprise. In the past 18 years, Massive Attack have released only four albums. And the last of those, 2003's 100th Window, was the first album of theirs to fully fade into wallpaper when you weren't paying very close attention. Since then, they've busied themselves with stuff like the score to the fairly badass Jet Li flick Unleashed, seemingly giving up on recapturing the power they once had. Back when they were pretty much inventing trip-hop, the group built bruised hellscapes out of whatever they could find: dusty rap breakbeats, film-score orchestral stabs, creeped-out 2-Tone skank. They knew just when to drop something unexpected into the mix, like the downtuned metal guitar that always raised goosebumps on "Angel". But on 100th Window, they stopped building tracks, letting the grooves just sit there instead. And despite the deeply impressive roster of guest vocalists on Splitting the Atom, they're still stuck in that rut-- and, just as alarmingly, so are their remixers.
Splitting the Atom has four tracks: two new originals, and two remixes of new songs we've yet to hear. The title track uses the deep mutters of 3D and Daddy G and the angelic, quavery croon of reggae vet and longtime collaborator Horace Andy. The track has all the elements of the group's classic sound: funhouse organs, "Ghost Town" echo-rattles, organ drone, voices that just flutter in the background without ever quite revealing themselves. The lyrics evoke a slow apocalypse: "It never stops and we'll never learn/ No hope without dope and the jobless return." But the song's drum-track is clumsy and pedestrian, and the song doesn't move toward anything; it just plods quietly along for five minutes. "Pray for Rain" recruits TV on the Radio's Tunde Adebimpe to growl stony, disconnected imagery over a sprawling, expansive groove. In its seven minutes, the song does hint at something bigger, but after the cool little Aphex Twin bleeps come in, it just doubles back to its slow beginning, repeating the whole first verse over again. These days, Adebimpe's regular producer, Dave Sitek, is way better at these nervously monolithic jams.
The two remixes, meanwhile, both seem content to sloppily imitate the Knife without really indicating that the songs underneath all the spooky vocoders are worthy of attention. Elbow's Guy Garvey's mewls are barely audible on the Van Rivers and the Subliminal Kid remix of "Bulletproof Love", and onetime Tricky muse Martina Topley-Bird growls through filters on the Flash treatment of "Psyche". The Knife are a good blueprint for haunted synth tracks, and the version of "Psyche" might be the heaviest thing here, but it sounds nothing like Massive Attack. Maybe these original tracks will make more of an impact on the actual album, but I can't see how.
With last year's Third, Bristol contemporaries Portishead proved that trip-hop old heads can still make damaged masterpieces that rival anything they ever did. But Portishead did it by leaping way beyond their old sound, not repeating their tricks and hoping they'll tickle the same buttons. If the next Massive Attack album is to mean anything, it'll need to do way more than play connect-the-dots with big-name collaborators-- it'll need to tap into something primal.
