Album du jour #18 - Threepoint shot away

Help! My need to be productive has been hijacked - by the NBA playoffs!

Last year's playoffs really got me into the game in a whole new way. Between ridiclously close games, thrilling come from behind victories, and a host of other dramatic stories and finishes....the '06 playoffs were widely heralded as perhaps the best ever. How could this year's possibly compare?

Well, they've gotten off to a decent start. The Raptors/Nets series is proving impossible to predict, and the Jazz/Rockets series will be a dogfight...but all that was nothing compared to what went down today, when both the Spurs and Mavs were horribly upset, and the Suns/Lakers game was a classic as always, with Kobe doing is best to one-up every bit of magic the Suns could pull off. I was ELATED to see the Nuggets beat the Spurs - and I hope beyond everything that they can keep it up. Went the other way on the Warriors/Mavs game (rare that I root for the non-underdog, and the Warriors, barely sliding into the playoffs, are the definition of an underdog) because I am determined to see the Dallas/Suns drama unfold in the finals. But it was all exciting, and I couldn't stick to my resolution to break away and write. I forgot 100% that Dice-K was pitching vs. the Yankees until I just now noticed on espn.com that the Sox won...my interest in that is a candle to the flame of fabulous basketball going on. It is going to be a long month. Man, I can't get over the Spurs losing....and for once, I'm motivated less by schaudenfreude than I am the wonderous thought of a Suns/Nugs semis.



Massive Attack - 100th Window (2003)

Prior Relationship to Album: Around my junior year of college I began to get into trip-hop (which has become a bad word in music critic circles, which is unfair, I thikn) and downtempo music. My progression in and through electronica went something like this (I'll save the more thorough sketch for my "history of music" post, a long one I've been working on in bits and pieces)

trance/club house -> psytrance -> ambient and IDM -> trip hop and deep house -> nu-jazz and latin house -> other stuff

Everything to the left of trip hop and deep house I have more or less stopped listening to (although some "IDM" gets a rare listen-to by me)...so Massive Attack is, in many ways, one of the electronic groups I have had the longest relationship with. Which makes it no surprise that it is laden with college-nostalgia for me.

And this nostalgia is unique in another sense; until recently, my listening habits were very rarely influenced by contemporary artists. When I was in middle school I was all about what was (kind of) current...R&B, grunge, alternative. But then the more I got into playing guitar the more I veered off into blues and classic rock, and I essentially stopped buying "new" music for a long period of time.

One other period (aside from current times) where I actually paid attention to current music was my senior year, when I was the RPM (aka, electronica) director for Whitman's radio station. I'm sure I've mentioned this before....in any case, the music I got via that avenue played a large role in opening new directions for me - err..when you read that last sentence to yourself, tone down how pretentious it sounds - and one of the albums was 100th Window. Of course I was already into Mezzanine (although I couldn't really tell my Portishead from my Massive Attack at that point), but this album led me to go back and pick up everything by Massive Attack. Which makes them one of the first bands that I ever got a nearly-complete discography of.

High Point: 100th Window isn't nearly as important or venturesome as Blue Lines or Mezzanine, but it is a remarkably efficient album. By which I don't mean song length (the average is in the 6-7 minute range), but in that it doesn't really take aim at doing anything but taking the strongest highs of Mezzanine and translating it into an album. Which makes it an impeccable, but not as amazing, album. The problem is that it doesn't do nearly enough to distinguish itself from itself, or Mezzanine. I have a hard time picking my favourite track due to this...the best of the bunch is probably 03 "Everywhen," but listen to it right after Mezzanine and it doesn't sound nearly as powerful. The other that I'm tempted to pick is 07 "Smalltime shot away," for reasons that escape me.

Low Point: 02 "When Your Soul Sings" would be a great song...if it wasn't UTTERLY INDISTINGUISHABLE from "Teardrop" off of Mezzanine (or rather, a version of "Teardrop" with less bite, and more Shenead O' Connor, who sings in a bunch of the songs). Shameless, really.

What I Learned/Realized: This album title refers to some book about security in the internet age...basically the idea that you only need to leave one window (out of a hundred) open for your privacy to be comprimised by the government.

I quote from Wikipedia: "Two weeks after the release of the album, Del Naja [the member of Massive Attack who was mainly responsible for this album] was arrested as part of Operation Ore, a police operation intending to indict users of web sites featuring child pornography. The charges were dropped a month later after no sign of such material was found on his personal equipment." Heh.

Future Relationship to Album: As much as it bothers me that this album feels...soft, in comparison to their earlier stuff, it is still among the best at creating that style I love of harmonic and powerful swells of darkness that paradoxically uplift. For me, this window opens onto a black yet prisimatic sky. And also grants me the ability to say cheesy lines like that with half a straight face.