Massive Attack Has Never Sounded So Good
The trip hop group’s “Unfinished Sympathy,” which turned 30 years old this pandemic winter, evokes the urban soundscape of a lost era.
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The singer Shara Nelson, center, with Massive Attack s Andrew Mushroom Vowles (left) and Robert 3D Del Naja.
This month marked the thirtieth anniversary of Massive Attack’s “Unfinished Sympathy,” not that anyone was keeping track. The song remains, for me at least, the high-water mark of what came to be known as trip hop, a bastard genre of languorous tempos and ponderous atmospherics that was once a staple of coffee shops in Amsterdam before becoming the background music at your local Starbucks. Like punk before it, trip hop was appropriated and commercialized nearly at the point of its inception, confounding its legacy. Chris Kraus claims that punk’s “golden age lasted somewhere between four and eighteen months”; trip hop had at least a few years in the ea
With reference to Nicholas Lezard’s Twitter antagonist (Down and Out, 12 February), disdain for the banal might not be the evidence of high-minded seriousness some would assume. We find respect, even reverence, for the commonplace in poets such as William Blake, who famously wrote of seeing the world in a grain of sand, or the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh (not noted for frivolity), who celebrated being able to “wallow in the habitual, the banal” after successful major surgery. Vermeer and other Dutch interior artists’ luminously detailed scenes of daily middle-class domesticity remain powerfully affecting; similarly, the contemporary artist Claire Kerr’s treatments of everyday scenes or discarded objects and fragments elicit a profound, response. In an age where constant, urgent demands on our attention can leave us feeling harried and helpless, it feels salutary occasionally to pause to appreciate the banal, everyday lives we lead.
For several years now, it’s seemed like a certain kind of pop songwriting – sophisticated, searching, probing, intimate, more interested in melodic expression than ear-grabbing bombast – had fallen out of favor. Folks like David Sylvian, Prefab Sprout and the Blue Nile have been quiet for some time now, and while Everything But the Girl’s Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn remain (gloriously) active, it’s unclear who represents a new generation that might step in to take the relay stick. Until now, that is.
Trading under the name
Paul Darrah assumes the mantle with his first full-length LP
Flight. Recorded in both New York and Norway, these nine songs deftly mix warm synthesizer textures with a lightly soulful rhythm section to showcase Darrah’s reserved romantic anguish. “Nothing we could say could keep the end away,” he asserts in the deceptively peppy “End Away,” sounding like a mid-80s Scottish pop/soul band whose singer discovered his lover left him right before
Memoir, biography, essays and more. By Aoife Barry Saturday 9 Jan 2021, 7:00 AM Jan 9th 2021, 7:00 AM 12,406 Views 0 Comments
Image: Shutterstock/patpitchaya
Image: Shutterstock/patpitchaya
YES, THERE ARE still more books to look out for this year. We already told you what Irish books to watch out for, and what international fiction to keep track of.
Here’s our list of mostly international non-fiction for those who prefer things out of the fictional realm.
Somebody’s Daughter by Ashley Ford
Ford, a features writer, has a huge amount of fans in the US – but many here too in Ireland. This book, about the imprisonment of her father and its effect on her life, is sure to be a fascinating read.