383. Massive Attack, "Mezzanine"

 

A dark, brooding album full of emotion and borderline physical pain, this record was recorded as the band, which formed in Bristol, England, in the 80's, was fracturing under the strain.  I guess it's the definitive trip-hop album but it really defies description.  Just listen to something like "Teardrop," with its heart-rending melody, sung by the Cocteau Twins' Elizabeth Fraser, on the day she found out that her estranged friend Jeff Buckley had drowned.  That kind of bleakness suffuses the whole album.  It's an Internet cliche by now to say that something is a "mood" but this album is a fucking MOOD.  It produced four UK singles, including "Teardrop." It wasn't as big a hit in the US but I feel like it was just everywhere for a while. 

It's also connected to a certain point in time for me, namely the early aughts in San Francisco.  Cast your mind back to that time, when my sister was dating a DJ, because if you weren't dating a DJ in the early aughts in San Francisco, what even were you doing?  And at the same time my marriage was collapsing and my sister and I used to take long drives mostly just so I could get out of my house, which was a pressurized autoclave of unspoken resentments and underhanded slights, and sometimes as we drove around we'd listen to this album, which I had somehow acquired on a cassette, and the feel of this album was a perfect match for the distress I didn't want to portray.  There are also songs, like "Inertia Creeps," that are explicitly about a decaying relationship, so maybe that's why it spoke to me.

Time goes on.  My sister and the DJ broke up.  I got divorced and remarried.  The car we used to take our drives in was totalled in an accident.  I don't know where the tape went.  But now, years later listening to this again for the first time in a long time, I'm back in that place, slowly being torn apart, waiting to be put back together.