Massive Attack: Collected : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Their old jogging buddy tricky may have been the one who used Pre-Millennium Tension as an album title, but no one captured the creeping dread of the 1990s better than the Bristol, England, group Massive Attack. Slowing hip-hop's funk down to a crawl, delivering dyspeptic raps in raspy whispers and texturing their tracks with the crepuscular film of heavy dub, Daddy G, 3D and Mushroom defined the trip-hop sound. Disc One is piled with crucial cuts from their four albums, none better than "Five Man Army," where over an Al Green/Willie Mitchell rimshot drum loop the ghostly moaning of reggae legend Horace Andy freezes time. Among Disc Two's ten rare and reworked recordings, "I Want You" casts mature mom Madonna as an icy seductress, and the pistol-grip funk of "I Against I" finds Mos Def rhyming, "Only one of us can ride forever/So you and I can't ride together." The bonus DVD's sixteen videos make this a superior, welcome collection.