The first time I flew from Syracuse to Baltimore, I was sure I was going to die. Shoehorned into one of those two-engine propeller planes, surrounded by screaming kids, snow starting to fall, warnings of turbulence crackling over the loudspeakers, nothing looked good. I slid on my Walkman and tried not to move until the whole thing was over, but then something amazing happened. "Teardrop" came on, a rainy, depressive drum track giving away to a breathtakingly gorgeous two-note harpsichord line, shivery guitar bits floating in, Liz Fraser cooing angelically, everything building slowly and gently into a blissful haze while I stared out the tiny porthole window at the sun setting over a frozen forest. All of a sudden, everything was going to be OK.
Massive Attack's music brings back memories: not that crazy weekend you piled into a van and drove down to New Orleans for New Year's Eve, but those quiet and isolated instants, images that stuck in your mind for no reason, moments when your life started to feel like a movie. That's why Hollywood has been pillaging the group's catalogue for more than a decade, using its songs to score Sharon Stone humping a Baldwin in Sliver or Brad Pitt's mom's trailer burning in Snatch. "Teardrop" is Massive Attack's biggest-ever hit, the only time the group grazed the UK's top 10 singles chart, but more Americans know it as the theme to "House" than anything else.
Massive Attack have never been anyone's idea of a singles act, and that's what makes the idea of a best-of album a bit dodgy. The group has only released four proper albums over the past 15 years: one absolute must-have masterpiece, two excellent long-players of languidly existential mood-music, and one total piece of shit. Collected is sequenced for flow, not for chronology, even though any 14 randomly-selected Massive Attack tracks would flow together just fine. This means that music from that piece of shit, the band's recent 100th Window, is more difficult to avoid; the anemic IDM drums and imitation-Kid A processed vocals of "Butterfly Caught" sound even worse when sandwiched between relative masterpieces like "Protection" and "Unfinished Sympathy". A bonus disc of rarities rescues the crushingly claustrophobic electro-dub Mos Def collaboration "I Against I" from the Blade 2 soundtrack, but it's mostly given over to gloppy, dismal background fare, making it difficult to understand why it's here at all.
But a few inevitable stopovers in bullshit-land don't change the fact that Collected is a pretty incredible set of tracks; the group's fierce, creepy, paranoid fogscapes have aged better than the glassy boutique-music of any of their 90s trip-hop imitators. They've always fit better into the UK's Eno-PiL-Radiohead continuum of woozy pop experimentalists than into any loosely defined electronica scene anyway, and listening now, it's remarkable how they managed to combine so much disparate source-material into their expansively deep groove. The early masterpiece "Five Man Army" builds off the intricate, sidelong drum break from Al Green's "I'm Glad You're Mine", the same one Eric B & Rakim used for "Mahogany", layering on a relentlessly burbley bassline, an emaciated late-Specials guitar-skank, and a ghostly flute while Tricky, Daddy G, and 3D trade loose, free-associative rap verses and reggae vet Horace Andy's croon floats over the gaps.
Other tracks add glistening pools of flanged-out postpunk guitars and lushly romantic strings and lonely jazz-saxophone flourishes. A small army of female guest-vocalists are featured (ethereal Fraser, soulfully robust Shara Nelson, wistfully precise Tracey Thorn), but the tracks never lose their dusty menace. The main disc ends with a new song, "Live With Me", an itchy, ringing, gorgeous slow burn with a broken, smoky vocal from Chicago folk-jazz legend Terry Callier, and it shows that the group may not have utterly died with the abject failure of 100th Window. Collected may not be a substitute for grabbing the group's essential records, but you'll be happy to have it the next time you end up on a two-engine propeller plane.
