ON a balmy autumn night in Kings Park last Friday, Bristolian trip-hop pioneers Massive Attack delivered a breathtaking musical attack on the senses.
With a back catalogue spanning two decades and five diverse albums, it was going to be interesting to see what incarnation of Massive Attack would appear on stage.
Luckily for local audiences, it was a mature, yet still relevant, group of musicians and artists who gathered to deliver the best electronic gig in Perth in over a year.
The set list spanned all corners of the group’s colourful and troubled past, and included a decent selection of tracks from their compelling new album Heligoland.
Two of the three original founding members – Robert “3D” Del Naja and Grant “Daddy G” Marshall – were joined on stage by four other musicians to fill out the huge sound they were generating, along with a selection of singers who recreated the guest spots on some of the group’s most identifiable tracks.
Gorgeous afro-sprouting support act Martina Topley-Bird – who had wowed the crowd earlier in the evening with her solo musings alone on stage – joined the group for Babel and Psyche from the new album before returning later in evening to deliver a heartbreakingly still rendition of 1998’s Teardrop.
Mezzanine, the group’s darkest and most commercially successful album, featured prominently throughout the show, from the aforementioned Teardrop, to a blistering Risingson, to Horrace Andy emerging to deliver a definitive rendition of the gutsy Angel.
Singer Deborah Miller took on the group’s epic debut hits, Unfinished Symphony and Safe From Harm, only to remind the crowd that they were witnessing true legends of the electro genre.
Behind the performers was an LCD screen, which was cut into bars.
How the visuals on this screen were utilised changed from song to song, often reflecting the strong political standpoints the group vocally believes in, nothing new though if you think back to the band being banned from UK radio during the Gulf War.
This visual commentary peaked during the anthemic build of Inertia Creeps, when all eyes were on the confronting statements blazing across the screen, all the while being shaken to the core by the huge wall of sound being produced so intensely by the musicians onstage.
Speaking of the sound, this is how a sound mix should be – absolutely amazing, even though it was a slight shame that a number of drunken punters talked throughout the gig, often spoiling many of the low tempo moments.
While it may have been a number of years since their heyday, Massive Attack came and conquered.