Massive Attack

24/02/2010

Trip hop veterans make storming return as trio

Massive Attack
Newport Centre, Newport
4/5

Bristol music royalty play Wales tonight, surprisingly for the first time, with perfectly-twinned support from long-time Massive Attack associate Martina Topley-Bird. Her fascinating sounds are built from delay loops and a selection box of invention, making it easy to see why her album, The Blue God, found itself on the Mercury Prize shortlist.

From the moment Massive Attack walk onstage, a feeling of respectful gravitas supports everything that follows. Forceful, dynamic beats, twisted rhythms and authoritative vocals rise under a menacing purple-smoke covered sky. We are all breathless from the instant impact.

Famed as pioneers of trip hop, the term seems woefully inadequate these days. This new work feels more spiritual, challenging and absolving.

One of several guest vocalist on the duo’s latest album Heliogoland, Martina Topley-Bird sings her track ‘Babel’ to a backdrop of displayed dialogue skitting across a light diode wall at the back of the stage that unravels soldiers in pursuit of someone taking refuge in a mosque. The sensory conflict over emotive music continues to make an impact all night, especially for ‘Flat Of The Blade’, where the music becomes wholly subservient to a highly disturbing narrative of verbatim quotes and testimonies by the politically tortured.

As their long-term Palestinian charity work confirms, Massive Attack are never shy about speaking out against inhumanities, and over the course of the show we are confronted with every kind of subversive data and statistic from personal wealth versus gross national products, as well as the dates and times of extradition flights, via this Wall Street-type info wall.

With Robert del Naja and Grant Marshall (3D and Daddy G respectively) together at the helm for the first time since Mezzanine in 1998, there are good signs that Heligoland might reveal itself as a new classic. With most of the album heard tonight, an ebbing undertow has harnessed Massive Attack’s familiar edge-teetering paranoia to the purposes of more worldly concerns.

Damon Albarn guests on the album, but the band’s familiar and much-loved cohort Horace Andy takes the live role for the beautifully haunting ‘Saturday Come Slow’.

Much to the delight of all present, the set list is not confined to new material. Another guest vocalist, Deborah Miller, adequately sings the two big Shara Nelson classics, ‘Unfinished Sympathy’ and ‘Safe From Harm’ (both from debut album Blue Lines), while Topley-Bird does a good job on ‘Teardrop’, Elizabeth Fraser’s domain on Mezzanine.

Also lifted from Mezzanine, ‘Inertia Creeps’ and its then-novel sound, suggestive of East meets West, seems more commonplace these days, but it is still a chilling, thrilling favourite.

As the band in all its strength draw this amazing event to a close with ‘Karmacoma’ (from Protection), the feeling of satisfaction comes from witnessing a collection of vital musicians still hungry to push boundaries. 

Jane Oriel