As the most pivotal force in post-rock music, this or any other year, Massive Attack continue to impress - and more so if you deign to take a trip down trip-hop lane on their recently released and very ambitious 11-CD box set of singles.
What gets you most is not the amount of stellar talent that has passed through the Bristol academy of excellence over the last 10 or so years (Tricky, Horace Andy, half of Portishead, Tracey Thorn, Elizabeth Frazier), nor the names they've got in to re-mix their work (Primal Scream, Manic Street Preachers, half of Blur, Brian Eno etc;), it's more that where they've chosen to position themselves means that acts like Bjork, Gusgus and Morcheeba can only approximate but never better their sound.
Much was made of their inter-racial, genre-bending sound when they were first picked up on the radar screens a year or two before Blue Lines. On paper it didn't sound great - the trio of Robert Del Naja, Grant Marshall and Andrew Vowles were more DJs and MCs than musicians, and while their record collection was correctly indexed, "C" for The Clash and "P" for Public Enemy, the early press that suggested they were "a dance band you couldn't dance to" sounded ominous in those hopeless acid house days when the ability to blow a whistle was taken as an indication of musical accomplishment.
Originally a collective known as The Wild Bunch, they owed a lot of their early sound to producer Nellee Hooper, who had also worked with Soul 2 Soul and later with Bjork and Madonna. Punk met reggae met soul, but always in a way that was more than the sum of its constituent parts, and on the debut album what was most remarkable was that they could also turn their turntables to torch songs (most notably on Unfinished Sympathy).
Notable, too, was Tricky's contribution to Blue Lines, as he afforded a preview of the sort of stuff he would get up to later on Maxinquaye, never mind the strong reggae voice of veteran Horace Andy or the divaesque warblings of Shara Nelson.
Not being overly endowed in the vocal department themselves, you can trace the band's history through their chosen singers. The follow-up album, Protection Everything But The Girl's Tracey Thornback to the limelight and introduced the wonderfully warbly Nicolette, while this year's Mezzanine rescued ex-Cocteau Twin, Elizabeth Frazier from the indie ghetto and got the best vocal performance out of her since her outstanding take on Tim Buckley's Song To The Siren on the eponymous This Mortal Coil album. Never really a singles band, it's a tad of a surprise to find that Massive Attack have committed 11 songs to the 45 format over the years. While most will be familiar (though not to those enthusiastic screamagers who ring up the Hotline), it's really the B-sides and the re-mixes which get you sucking the diesel here. Unlike most other poor re-mixes, where you get formulaic techno/dub/ambient workouts that go into Tangerine Dream 10-minute coma-inducing territory, there's some nifty stuff here. The early stuff from Perfecto is pretty much dated now, but the Mad Professor's dub-tastic twiddles suit the mood nicely.
Near-neighbours Portishead (Geoff Barlow worked as a tape-op on Blue Lines, if you really need to know) work their eerie wonders on Karmacoma, while the Scream Team (Primal Scream plus assorted messers) get a bit excited when handling Teardrop. What The Manic Street Preachers were trying to get up to on Inertia Creeps is best kept behind closed doors, and Damon Albarn and Graham Coxon should have been red-carded for their take on Angel.
The latter two, coming as they do from a more orthodox place, seemed to have got a bit giddy when left alone to play at the mixing desk and their clumsy fumblings can be contrasted with Underworld's far more assured work on Risingson.
The obvious questions to be asked here, though, are (a) wouldn't you be better off with the original three albums and (b) can anybody do the Massive Attack sound better than they can. The answer, in both cases, is a definite maybe.
Massive Attack: The Singles Collection Box Set is on The Virgin label.
