Massive Attack’s Mezzanine is an album that’s generally regarded to be a stone-cold classic. In music, yes. But especially within the trip-hop genre that the collective from Bristol practically brought into existence. The record taps into a darkness and possesses this sinister aura that I feel a lot of people couldn’t have seen coming. Blue Lines and Protection, the two albums already released by the outfit, were arguably more-relaxed and optimistic in their delivery. I say that, it might not have been such a surprise. The album’s second track ‘Risingson’ had already been released to the public as its first single, nine months before Mezzanine’s arrival, and was the sign that there was certainly something different to be expected on the LP that was on the way.

I don’t think I listened to Mezzanine in full until about 2013, when I was going through a best ever album list on a website somewhere. ‘Teardrop’ was the only song on there I was accustomed to, having seen its video multiple times on the TV. There was something effortlessly atmospheric and as I said before dark about the entire project. I downloaded it to my computer. It sat there for a while. Then I revisited it in 2018 or so, and it was then that I suddenly recognised ‘Risingson’ as a ‘new’ favourite. Its ‘toy-like people make me boy-like’ lyric was one that had been stuck in my head for years since that first time, but with that re-listen, I had a new found appreciation for the slick bass line, those reverbs on 3D’s ‘dream on’ vocals that float like dust into the either, Daddy G’s nod to ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone’ by the Kingston Trio, the ‘I Found a Reason’ Velvet Underground sample that comes in near the end. Little things like that. It was also upon research with a new-found interest in the song that I learned it also had a music video too. A cool one at that, directed by Walter Stern, where the band are in a house that’s being attacked. A lot of tension’s built where it looks like the members are in danger or are on the brink of being harmed. But it’s a happy ending as absolutely nothing happens to them.

The song’s lyrics concern the goings on in a dank nightclub, observed from the perspectives of both 3D and Daddy G in their respective verses, who particularly make notes on how people seem to change once drugs come into the picture. The former watches on with a sort of disinterest and pity, the latter wants to leave altogether. They deliver their words in talk-singing styles that seem to symbolize their numbness to the whole ordeal. And against a hypnotizing groove with contrasting melodic elements in the mix, it makes everything being described by the two vocalists sound shady and of a questionable nature. The making of Mezzanine was one that was fuelled with tension and frustration between members. Its production and the drastic sonic shift in tone was something that member Andrew “Mushroom” Vowles couldn’t get along with. So much so that he left the outfit soon after the album’s release. The trio Massive Attack was at the time became a duo. It was a six-year wait until the next album. They were never quite the same.