Absence
Not just to create something from it, but rather, to make from its quaking, rumbling, and at times even stifling depths… a visage that leaves that of the audible, and enters into an all encompassing being like a main character, slowly but surely sauntering into a sudden existence that came in the form of a heady, numbing darkness.
Such is the specialty of Massive Attack, and their ability to take from a silence that you can practically feel, a rushing in of sound and texture that you’d feel blind to not have seen coming.
For almost 30 years (27, to be exact), their style-defining album known as ‘Mezzanine’ has maintained a residency at their entryway. In fact, it is all but guaranteed for every novice to them and their particular section of their genre: you will stumble upon it, lose your footing for but an instant as well as barely establish a grip on its raw form, and in finally managing a hold – with both hand and ear and entire body – you will suddenly find yourself with your feet hovering above the ground.
Then floating.
Then levitating.
Then getting dangerously and exhilaratingly higher and higher –
And that is not even breaching upon the real pinnacle of it all.
We’ve not yet begun to soar far enough. The song has only just started.
And in following the winged heights of ‘Angel’, the very first track of the album itself, there is to be heard the listenable journey to Heaven that does not so much depict the coming of a Paradise, but the ascending past a quietly burning Hell, a cacophonous Limbo, and from thence into a sweet silence.
Of which all sound – blessed or otherwise – is born from.
‘She’s on the Dark Side’
It bleeds up from a barely settled nothing. It being the first 4 seconds or so of the track.
So empty at one, practically microscopic moment, before suddenly the next is full of earth and richness, like soil filling the ears while climbing up from its foundation as if buried. The ‘tik-tik-tik-tik’s and pops that follow, alongside the rest of the percussion that softly slithers in like something following us to the top, are the snapping of roots in our fingers, gripped and then heaved as leverage to get higher and farther.
Only the farther along we go, the heavier and thicker the weight of the beginning becomes, making the head race with a low, resonating thrum, and the thoughts within it appear in an instant and then vanish with nothing but a reverb as its trail. Or an echo.
It is not yet maddening. But inspiring. Dangerously influencing the concoction of other images; states of being.
Perhaps it is not so much the climbing through the killing nestle of the earth, but the being suspended in the clouded heights of a cold sky. And that thrumming in your head is no dirt in your ears, but the pressure of some 2,000, 3,000, 4,000 feet.
And getting higher.
So entrancing is this wordless beginning alone, full of dark-intended visuals to keep one’s imagination within the vein of creating a villain – or even Satan – when suddenly out of nowhere, a human appears.
“You are my Angel…
Come from way above –
To bring me love (to bring me love)…”
The voice is almost wearing an eerie smile. One could rightly hear it without even straining. Just in the mouthful that it took to sing “aaangel”, there are upturned lips, unveiled teeth, and a fully voweled openness that sings of an ecstasy… that borders on frightening.
Nothing at all like an angel. All too painfully human, as told before.
Or even more so, and to give further illustration: a worshipper.
And they bring with them the fruits of their devotion, and all that it entails – a sharp cut through the thrumming bass with a sudden call-tone, repeating itself as if warning of what’s to come. Then it does: drums that sound like falling in slow motion, with your back towards the plummeting earth in which you cast down towards.
But since Heaven is the looming threat, more aptly is it the rumbling of a revelation of a storm; a light that begins to break its way through the darkness with a trace of heat first, then the overtaking of the earthly drone with its oncoming, equal parts ethereal and foreboding undertone of what could be voices, dissonant with a barely there harmony. The foretold choir, almost, that summons the presence of every angel. Only it does not instill warm, fuzzy feelings.
But a bubbling dread.
Teasing. Getting closer between hiding in the safety of its former silence as if brewing up with sound and sound alone the formation of the towering outline; of wings.
Then, fanfared with one more warning… They break through.
“Love you, love you,
love you, love you,
love you, love you,
love you, love you…”
The hard bash of percussion, the one strike of a drum that times the final blow before the door breaks down to the book of Revelations, and our Angel comes roaring in to the tune of a low and yet wailing guitar. What mammoth shapes, sizes and faces that a racing head could create at this wave of an onslaught, surrounding one’s enraptured nerves with a hybrid torrent of the darkness’ depths, and the light’s rising tide – it is endless. Maybe even only the one could be painstakingly put into words.
What else that may come to the mind is just colors, flashes of white; the biting cold of flying to far up and too high, before the euphoric overtaking of a sweet nothingness takes the reins, and you are thus suspended, finally in Heaven, led by an angel…
And entirely laid waste to.
‘Neutralize (Every man inside)’
What is heaven to a vessel that is void, if not the filling of itself to the brim?
What overflow there may be is perhaps at first welcomed, until you are suddenly drowning.
However, at such a point as the end, it is practically inviting; and deliriously so. It is worthy of the babbling that comes from being confronted with what had been so far unseen by man’s eyes, and unheard by their ears, and then is suddenly revealed in a powerful bout of religious psychosis.
And all in the form of a being that, throughout time, has been depicted as firstly a messenger of salvation, and then now a bringer of raw, fearsome power that very well has the ability to destroy as well as strike awe.
Indeed – what is heaven to a soul that is void?
And what is an angel to them when they’ve come to fulfill them?
Massive Attack scores such an answer: a building up of what sounds infernal, but is actually biblical. And unworthy though these mortal senses may be, to hear and bravely attempt to withstand it is being there to greet such a creature right at its arrival, at such a time as what could be the end.
Even if it may end us, halfway through listening.