For Lonely Days

Massive Attack featuring Tricky “Take It There”

It was sad to read a bunch of aggregated news items about this song that didn’t even mention why it’d be significant that Tricky would be on this track. I suppose that even though so much popular and cool music today owes a massive debt to the work of Bristol acts like Massive Attack, Tricky, and Portishead, it’s all been more or less written out of the story, and what amounts to a Blue Lines/Protection reunion after more than 20 years is somehow not particularly noteworthy. Deeeep siiiiiigh! I don’t think any topic triggers a “get off my lawn” anger in me more than everyone under 30 having virtually no awareness of Tricky.

“Take It There” doesn’t sound like a reunion. There’s so much overlap in Tricky and Massive Attack’s aesthetics that they sound like they’re lurking around in the space they’ve always been. If anything, that space has become darker and more claustrophobic with time, and more like where Tricky was in the late ‘90s. The low piano chords in this track sound oppressively heavy, like a weight bearing down on the rest of the music that forces the beat to drag. Tricky and 3D rap in the odd way they do – a bit hazy on the rhyming, but just enough on beat to qualify. Their rasps are even deeper than ever, as though whatever darkness they had growing in them in the ‘90s has metastasized. There’s an ascending guitar part in the second half of the track that shakes off some of the weight, but it never stops feeling hopeless.

Buy it from Amazon.