Mezzanine

Mezzanine is Massive Attack’s third album, released by Circa and Virgin on 20 April 1998. Official Charts lists catalogue WBRCD4 and a first chart date of 2 May 1998, when it went to number one in Britain. Robert Del Naja, Grant Marshall and Andrew Vowles made it with the co-producer Neil Davidge. Elizabeth Fraser, of Cocteau Twins, sings Teardrop and Group Four. Horace Andy is on Angel. Vowles left the group in the period after the record. The public story of the sessions is a band pulling apart while the music got heavier: post-punk guitars, slower tempos, less of the soul-sample warmth that Blue Lines had lived on.

Teardrop is the song that left the album and kept travelling. Fraser’s vocal, a harpsichord figure, a rhythm that sits closer to a heartbeat than to a break. Walter Stern’s video, a fetus in the frame, became the image. Angel is the other one DJs and film editors would not leave alone: Andy’s voice, a bass that feels like a threat, Del Naja in the margins. Inertia Creeps is his own song about a relationship, and it is the track where the album’s tempo makes the most sense, too slow for the dancefloor they had come from and too tense to be background. Risingson keeps a hip-hop edit’s logic inside the new gloom.

People filed the whole Bristol run under one word and then acted surprised when this one did not sound like Blue Lines. Seven years had passed. One of the three was on the way out. A singer from a different British group had come in and sung the song that would outlive the scene name. It was number one for two weeks. The useful listening is the sequence, not the single: Angel, then Risingson, then Teardrop, then the long back half where Fraser returns and the guitars stay. That is the album Vowles played on and then left.

Sources

• Mezzanine: Circa/Virgin, 20 April 1998, personnel, Elizabeth Fraser, Horace Andy, Neil Davidge, and Vowles’s departure.
• Official Charts: catalogue WBRCD4, first chart date 2 May 1998, peak position 1.