Massive Attack, September 5, 2019 at the Hollywood Palladium

Trip-hop didn’t do much for me in the ‘90s save for maybe Portishead or Ruby (the lack of range between the two showing how far I didn't go with it), but as usual Carla had already been to anything cool no matter how obscure (or obscured). It was easy to bring me into Massive Attack as they soundtracked some of our early, special moments together, but they were really something I should known about on my own. I knew them from a few remixed tracks and they had a great visual design, but it wasn’t as much as it should have been. I still wasn’t completely sold when we got the tickets if they were just another alt band years past their height (though being British helped), but I got it later, catching up before the show (originally set for May) so I could appreciate it properly. This was a performance of Mezzanine, apparently their biggest album, but I’d picked up enough by then to know that they weren’t sticking only to that album but letting other stuff weave into the set. They certainly played the whole album, as advertised, but in their own order with other tracks mixed in (all covers that had been so fundamentally transformed that I realized they were credited to having played only when I looked at the set-list), which inferred that they were leaving out anything else from their other albums in deference to their own whims. But they had the guest-stars who originally performed those songs, and that was enough. Even if they weren't really performing in the tradition sense, they had done the heavy lifting of creation years before already, which they represented, and it was the best they could do with the magnificence they'd created and now returned to (if that was only a version as a starting point for what they shaped the show into). Not long after this show I found my way to their other stuff, in particular Blue Lines, which was a sufficiently superior work, so it’s good I didn’t know “Unfinished Sympathy” at the time, since even “Teardrop” wouldn’t have been enough of a substitute. An electronic act doing a whole album might not have been the same challenge as a live band, since they could replicate any sound they recorded with something canned, which a band couldn't necessarily pull off, including vocalists, so having the originals there was superfluous but a nice touch (and surely got them out of the house if they needed that). On the screen beyond they had some great visuals that referred to a paranoid conspiracy thing like what helped define the ‘90s, so it was either stuck in that era or very forward-thinking (and anticipating or following nostalgia for that decade), but they had the right to make the reference, having helped define a sub-sub-genre of music with this album (at least somewhere in the world). Even the guys eschewing any banter or acknowledging any of the world around them was a chilly reference, cold enough to be cool, and in keeping with electronic acts who let the computers do the performing, but their presence such a minimal amount of humanity that it would be welcome, when all this performance could be canned and they might be up on stage checking their e-mail. But if only for the music and the visual throw-back it made for a night out and an appreciation of a seminal work (and gateway to more), even if Carla & I wouldn’t be allowed to replicate those special moments in public.

Massive Attack set-list:
“I Found a Reason“ (The Velvet Underground cover)
“Risingson“
“10:15 Saturday Night“ (The Cure cover)
“Man Next Door“ (John Holt cover) (with Horace Andy)
“Black Milk“ (with Elizabeth Fraser)
“Mezzanine“
“Bela Lugosi's Dead“ (Bauhaus cover)
“Exchange“
“See a Man's Face“ (Horace Andy cover)
“Dissolved Girl“
“Where Have All the Flowers Gone?“ (Pete Seeger cover)
“Inertia Creeps“
“Rockwrok“ (Ultravox cover)
“Angel“ (with Horace Andy)
“Teardrop“ (with Elizabeth Fraser)
“Levels“ (Avicii cover)
“Group Four“ (with Elizabeth Fraser)