Massive Attack - Mezzanine (1998) [Vinyl] [FLAC] [24bit 96kHz]

Vinyl Release Info

Artist: Massive Attack
Release: Mezzanine
Discogs: 6530
Released: 1998-04-20
Label: Circa
Catalog#: WBRLP4
Format: 2 x Vinyl, LP, Album
Country: Europe
Style: Electronic, Leftfield, Trip Hop, Downtempo

Tracklisting:

A1. Angel (6:18)
A2. Risingson (4:58)
A3. Teardrop (5:29)
B1. Inertia Creeps (5:56)
B2. Exchange (4:11)
B3. Dissolved Girl (6:07)
C1. Man Next Door (5:55)
C2. Black Milk (6:20)
C3. Mezzanine (5:54)
D1. Group Four (8:13)
D2. (Exchange) (4:08)

Album Review - consequence of sounds
If your first exposure to Massive Attack dripped through Neo’s headphones in his first appearance onscreen in The Matrix, Mezzanine might always coat the walls of a cyberpunk neo-noir for you. That’s the world it envelops for me: a world that articulates the reflexive fear of technology’s growing dominance, the fear that the machines we owned would soon own us. Google Glass, the iPhone, and the NSA’s surveillance network hadn’t even been invented yet, but we were already plunging into nightmares of full-blown dystopia. We could already download kung fu.
There’s a violence that courses through Mezzanine, a subtle menace that the UK trio pricked at with their lyrics, but never fully traced. Through the aperture of lines like “she’s on the dark side” and “you’re lost and you’re lethal,” Massive Attack let you imagine an enemy that was always out of sight. They sculpted the shadows.
Darker, slicker, and more monstrous than the group’s fizzy first steps, Mezzanine relied on heavy sampling to braid together disparate threads in music’s history. Its birth was a messy one; Robert Del Naja (AKA 3D) allegedly ripped up each track again and again before he arrived at the final mixes. You can hear it, too. While Protection and Blue Lines sounded neatly composed, Mezzanine felt grown. The album blossoms in enormous space, bigger and deeper than the tight channels electronic dance music tended to fill. This was computer music aimed not at clubs but at headphones, computer music concerned less with how to engineer the future than with how to hack the past.
It’s easy to forget that the Velvet Underground, Led Zeppelin, and the Cure all haunt this album. You don’t think about Robert Smith on “Man Next Door”, but he’s there, counting drips like he did in 1979, only this time he’s surrounded by danger instead of boredom, as vocalist Horace Andy plots escape from a violent neighbor. Meanwhile, Jon Bonham pounds from the grave, the beat from “When the Levee Breaks” slowed down and stretched out almost beyond recognition. Unlike the mashup microgenre that looks to it, Mezzanine doesn’t hopscotch from one source to another. Nothing’s slapped together. It doesn’t want you to recognize its roots. Massive Attack roped together music not by time or place, but by a nerve no one had thought to tease out.
It may have harnessed millennial dread, but Mezzanine didn’t shy from awe at its own newly hatched textures. Since wrapped around the opening credits to House, “Teardrop” still shines as the record’s sole bright spot in a storm of metallic shadow. Neon harpsichord levitates the elusive lyrics, sung delicately by Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser. Here, Massive Attack access the kind of emotional register that can’t be qualified as positive or negative, only intense, more euphoria and sadness to draw upon with each turn of the arpeggio.
Maybe it’s that ambivalence, that refusal to be pinned down, that landed Mezzanine so squarely inside the circle of “alt” kids that loved it a decade ago. Massive Attack was straight punk in my world. Mezzanine would blare on car stereos that otherwise only played marathons of Buzzcocks and Against Me! It bit just as hard in slow motion. If punk rock was a jackknife brandished in front of you, then Mezzanine was the cold steel of a gun nuzzling the back of your neck. We loved the threat of it just like we loved brazen aggression.
Massive Attack’s DNA is scattered everywhere ― the middle crunch of “Dissolved Girl” lies latent in Sleigh Bells’ twitchy backbone, and How to Dress Well owes plenty to the icy beauty of “Teardrop” ― but Burial must be their most direct descendant. Both acts cemented that lineage with a stunning collaborative 12” in 2011, though both tracks sounded distinctly Burial. You can’t tell where one artist begins and the other ends, because Burial designed his own mechanism by looking at Massive Attack’s. By listening to either, you’re grasping at glints in shadow.
At the end of Burial’s remix of “Paradise Circus”, Mazzy Star vocalist Hope Sandoval’s voice (unheard in the original) murmurs over and over, almost imperceptibly: “Let love flower.” Would she even be singing if it weren’t for Fraser’s “black flowers blossom”? Would we even have that image, that something could be dark, and poisoned, and still unstoppably alive? Would we still have this legion of young artists stitching together scraps on their laptops without that deep, echoed imperative in “Risingson”: “dream on”?
Essential Tracks: “Teardrop”, “Man Next Door”
AMG Album Review
Increasingly ignored amidst the exploding trip-hop scene, Massive Attack finally returned in 1998 with Mezzanine, a record immediately announcing not only that the group was back, but that they'd recorded a set of songs just as singular and revelatory as on their debut, almost a decade back. It all begins with a stunning one-two-three-four punch: "Angel," "Risingson," "Teardrop," and "Inertia Creeps." Augmenting their samples and keyboards with a studio band, Massive Attack open with "Angel," a stark production featuring pointed beats and a distorted bassline that frames the vocal (by group regular Horace Andy) and a two-minute flame-out with raging guitars. "Risingson" is a dense, dark feature for Massive Attack themselves (on production as well as vocals), with a kitchen sink's worth of dubby effects and reverb. "Teardrop" introduces another genius collaboration — with Elizabeth Fraser from Cocteau Twins — from a production unit with a knack for recruiting gifted performers. The blend of earthy with ethereal shouldn't work at all, but Massive Attack pull it off in fine fashion. "Inertia Creeps" could well be the highlight, another feature for just the core threesome. With eerie atmospherics, fuzz-tone guitars, and a wealth of effects, the song could well be the best production from the best team of producers the electronic world had ever seen. Obviously, the rest of the album can't compete, but there's certainly no sign of the side-two slump heard on Protection, as both Andy and Fraser return for excellent, mid-tempo tracks ("Man Next Door" and "Black Milk," respectively).

Thanks to the orginal encoder/uploader

Tonimahoni presenta
Massive Attack - Mezzanine
2LP Vinylrip
Label - Wild Bunch Records, Circa Records Ltd.
Catalog# - WBRLP4, 7243 8 45599 1 5
Format - 2 x Vinyl, LP, Album
Country - UK
Released - 20 Apr 1998
!!! this is a complete reworked version - recorded with new equipment !!!
Equipment:
Turntable: Technics SL-1900 automatic directdrive
System: Nagaoka MM 321 BE (new)
Cables: Cordial
Preamp: Dynavox TC-750
Card: M-Audio Audiophile 24/96
source was near mint - clear recording on third play by using listed Eqipment and Sony Soundforge 9.0
only manual tagging with foo - some click removal between the tracks - clear as a bell !

Sample Audio Info for Track 01

General
Format : FLAC
Format/Info : Free Lossless Audio Codec
File size : 116 MiB
Duration : 6mn 18s
Overall bit rate mode : Variable
Overall bit rate : 2 576 Kbps
Album : Mezzanine
Track name : Angel
Track name/Position : A1
Performer : Massive Attack
Recorded date : 1998
Comment : Encoded by FLAC v1.1.4a with FLAC Frontend v1.7.1 by tonimahoni for what.cd

Audio
Format : FLAC
Format/Info : Free Lossless Audio Codec
Duration : 6mn 18s
Bit rate mode : Variable
Bit rate : 2 576 Kbps
Channel(s) : 2 channels
Sampling rate : 96.0 KHz
Bit depth : 24 bits
Stream size : 116 MiB (100%)
Writing library : libFLAC 1.2.1 (UTC 2007-09-17)



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S71_vIMQ0YY
(YouTube) Massive Attack - Man Next Door
(YouTube) Massive Attack - Mezzanine (full album)
(YouTube) Massive Attack - Mezzanine
(YouTube) Massive Attack - Teardrop
(YouTube) mezzanine- MASSIVE ATTACK
(YouTube) Massive Attack- Mezzanine- Angel
(YouTube) Massive Attack - Angel
(YouTube) Massive Attack - Risingson
(YouTube) Massive Attack-Angel (Mezzanine album)
(YouTube) Massive Attack - Group Four
(YouTube) Massive Attack - Inertia Creeps