CityLife

Massive Attack

 

AT times deafeningly intense, occasionally menacing and always politically motivated: let there be no doubt that we are in the midst of something deeply significant.

But enough about the voicemails Gordon Brown leaves for Barrack Obama – Massive Attack are in town and they’ve brought Martina Topley Bird and Horace Andy with them for a set designed to showcase material from their latest EP alongside familiar favourites.

With their fifth long-player now more overdue than Mika’s retirement announcement, the band bring to these shows a peace offering comprising several new tracks – including one co-written with Bury’s hero of the hour Guy Garvey – taken from the stop-gap Splitting The Atom collection.

These bode well for the prospects of upcoming material. Each carries the sort of brooding politik we have come to expect from the band, while possessing a new-found sharpness and Radioheadesque guitar jangling, with fewer hazy, head-nodding atmospherics clouding the message.

And though the new tunes are well-received, it is music from the duo’s Mezzanine and Blue Lines albums which garners the warmest reception.

The band, probably tired of hearing it soundtrack adverts for Holby City season finales, deliver a new, stripped-back version of Teardrop that errs closer to the dreaded trip-hop tag than anything here tonight.

Despite Topley Bird’s tear-inducing vocal staying intact, the resultant cold noise eschews much of the emotion that made the original so special.

Other classic Attack fares better: Angel, never a quiet tune, is tonight delivered with the sort of booming power that most resembles two Transformers brawling during a thunderstorm, while Inertia Creeps sounds more than ever like being chased by dark spirits through a Middle Eastern marketplace.

During that, and a note-perfect telling of Safe From Harm, revolutionary quotes and slogans flash up and scroll along the background display like some sort of Situationist appropriation of a doctor’s surgery LED display, where the info about swine flu and waiting times is replaced by retina-busting riffs on topics such as ID cards, DNA databases and the CIA’s alleged ferrying of terror suspects.

The dazzling display seeks to induce sensory overload in the audience while instilling a sense of indignation. Apparently, the revolution starts with frazzled eyeballs.

Then, the band pull off an extraordinary rendition of their own: an encore-based Unfinished Sympathy featuring Phantom Limb vocalist Yolanda Quarty soars to epic proportions, reminding everyone why we fell in love with them in the first place.

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