Unlike their Bristol contemporaries– Tricky with a steady stream of new mediocre albums; Portishead with a long, long layoff that led to an unexpected and masterful reinvention– Massive Attack have spent the past 15 years working in brief, intermittent bursts of productivity. Five years separated Mezzanine from 100th Window, and then another seven elapsed before this year’s Heligoland. They filled the gaps with soundtrack work, but when it comes to Massive Attack the pop group, their albums are still infrequent enough to be sold as events, built up by singles featuring remixes by artists that let the band add the flavor of the current moment, whether that’s micro-house circa 100th Window or spacey electronic disco circa now.
The problem is that, as events, these albums have fallen flat. The remixes on the singles are usually more exciting, and certainly fresher, than the music Massive themselves have released in the 21st century. The band seems stuck in a holding pattern– not quite as glibly self-parodic as Tricky but afraid to fully make themselves over like Portishead– that’s led to albums that sound just enough like Massive’s classics not to feel totally burned and not quite different enough to justify listening to them over Protection. The sense of adventure is gone, the feeling that Massive not only could but must take their own music somewhere new. Best leave it to the younger, less resigned-to-their-sound artists to fill that feeling back in, as with the remix EP that added some unexpected angles to Heligoland earlier this year.
The Atlas Air EP doesn’t feel quite as essential as that, but then the shtick-like “Massive-style” dread of Heligoland was often so bland that any little spark of invention felt like an improvement. Though there’s a charity slant to this EP, it still feels like something snuck out near the end of the year to extend the album’s life a bit. Even if the intentions were that crass, and I’m not saying they are, these remixes improve on the original “Atlas Air”, which pulsed along soporifically on a slow-mo disco beat so by-the-numbers it was almost shameful. Tim Goldsworthy’s rework turns it into truly cosmic dance music and Jneiro Jarel’s makeover drops the tempo into a FlyLo/Brainfeeder trip-hop lurch, both filling in the clichéd “dark” negative space of the original with bright waves of almost kraut-ish synth dissonance. They’re actually eerie but also lovely, where the original felt like it was trying for both but not very hard.
In all cases, the remixers seem to have a better grasp on giving shape and drama to tracks via electronic texture than their benefactors do these days. That’s doubly a shame considering Massive were once masters at the very same thing; even their instrumentals were memorable, thick and richly detailed and gorgeously skirting the line between dreamy and abrasive. None of the remixes on Atlas Air is mind-blowing– they’re passable-to-good by the standards the producers have set– but they’re definite improvements on the bare-bones original. Which probably proves little but how sadly comfortable Massive are now with just getting by, with letting their followers do the heavy lifting.