Mezzanine

Eleven tracks in about sixty-three minutes, built on loops that grow by accretion, so that length is part of the method and not slack. Angel must open: a bass line alone, then a voice, then the guitar’s eruption, the record’s whole procedure in six minutes. Teardrop is the still centre the dread needs. Group Four, the longest, is the compelled climax, its length building a pressure it then releases, and (Exchange) is the compelled exhale, the instrumental of the middle returned as the lights come up. The test bites in the second half, and that holds the figure: Black Milk and the title track run in one mode, slow, close and dark, Man Next Door is the track least made from the record’s own matter, and a few loops are held past the point their pressure tells.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The disclosure can be stated: desire and threat are the same pulse, and intimacy in the city is lived as surveillance, waiting and dread. Man Next Door hears a neighbour through the wall and cannot rest; Inertia Creeps is an affair moving at the speed of a creeping thing. Teardrop is the one place the record states plainly, and what it states is that love is action, “love is a verb”, set against a record of people who do not act. Sound discloses as fully as words: the bass that presses on the chest and the voices whispered as if overheard give the condition a body. What holds it short of the bar is the balance between the two. The claustrophobia is rendered with great power and articulated little, a mood more than a meaning.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Elevation is frequent and mostly dreadful, and it comes by accumulation. Angel is the first summit: a bass line, Horace Andy’s high voice over it like a prayer, and then the guitar that tears the track open, a terror held back for three minutes and released. Teardrop is the warm height, Elizabeth Fraser’s voice over a keyboard figure and a heartbeat pulse, beauty without sweetness. Dissolved Girl rises on its distorted guitar; Black Milk is suspended and cold. Group Four is the last and largest rise, two voices passed back and forth until the band crashes in for the record’s loudest minutes. Seven or eight of eleven tracks rise, the highest very high. Risingson and Inertia Creeps carry menace more than height, and the title track and Exchange stay level.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Myth is evoked, and it gathers at one threshold. The title names it, the floor between floors, and the record lives there: between the club and the bedroom, desire and fear, night and morning. Angel sets a figure of devotion and protection in a voice from Jamaican roots music, and the angel turns dangerous when the guitar arrives. Teardrop’s image of a tear on the fire is close to an elemental emblem, and the stag beetle on the sleeve is an armoured creature of the night. The emblems are strong, and they share one place. What holds the axis is construction. The threshold is atmosphere more than a structure the sequence enacts, no figure bears the record, and the voices are positions in a mood rather than persons in a pattern.

Score: 7.7 / 10

The inheritance is the group’s own: the soul, dub and hip-hop of Blue Lines (1991), which had made a Bristol sound, and the smoother Protection (1994). Beside it stood Tricky’s Maxinquaye and Portishead, who had already darkened the form. The turn is real. Warm soul and jazz sources are exchanged for post-punk and rock ones, samples replayed and thickened by live guitar and drums, the tempo slowed, the bass made a weight, and the mood turned from cool to menacing. The stake was the group itself, and a member left after this record. What marks the limit is the path: dub bass under post-punk guitar was an old joining, made by Public Image and others twenty years before, and the turn deepens a language the group had made rather than leaving it.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Change the form and much of what the record knows goes, because the knowledge is in the pressure. A record about desire lived as dread is built of loops that repeat without resolving, bass pitched so low it is felt before it is heard, and voices set back, overheard, never in front. No voice leads: five singers pass through eleven tracks, a building of separate rooms heard through walls, as Man Next Door names it. The live guitar enters the loop as violence, and that collision is the argument. The sequence is counted here, once: the method laid bare at the start, Teardrop at the centre of the first half, Group Four as climax, (Exchange) as ending. Held short of the top: the form is one form repeated, and in the second half it serves more than enacts.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Evidence over twenty-eight years. The record has been returned to as sound more than as statement: producers and engineers still take apart its low end and its joining of sampled and played parts, and the genealogy of its sources, post-punk, reggae, soul and progressive rock, keeps listeners tracing it outward. Teardrop has been taken up and recast by other musicians, a sign that its frame stays open. The half-heard words reward close listening, since much of them is not caught at first. What holds the figure: the yield is formal far more than semantic, and part of what is found in the half-heard voices is projection invited by obscurity, as with any record that withholds its words. The surface yields more than the meaning.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The field is the music of the 1990s made from samples, bass and the studio, British above all, and its border with rock. The intrinsic force is real: the record carried the sampled, bass-led form into the weight and darkness of rock, made the loop and the live band one instrument, and set a sound of menace and space that much later production took up. The redirection of the field belongs more to the group’s first record, and the force here is a deepening. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record reached the top of the British chart, Teardrop became one of the decade’s most used and most covered tracks and was carried into broadcast as a television theme, and the record’s sound passed widely into film and television scoring and into electronic music with guitars.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Survival is weighed over twenty-eight years, on form, presence and fabric. The form is whole: the release of 1998 is the record heard, and reissues have added remixes beside it, not in its place. Presence is continuous and wide in its kind: the album is placed high whenever its decade is counted, and it is heard whole. Part of that presence is charged, carried by Teardrop’s life in broadcast, and the album is heard less widely than the song. The fabric is little fixed to its year: the record avoided the bright digital surfaces of the late 1990s, and its darkness and weight of bass have aged slowly, though some processed textures and the whispered delivery are of their time. It stands level with F♯ A♯ ∞, of the same year, and far below what has lasted centuries.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere. The making is load-bearing, and the low end is its signature: bass placed so that it occupies the room without blurring what sits above it. Sampled and played parts are joined so that the seam disappears; the drums are dry and heavy; guitars are used as weather, entering as storm. Fraser’s voice in Teardrop and Group Four is the record’s highest single performance, Horace Andy’s falsetto its most human, and the mix keeps a dense, dark record legible through sixty-three minutes. The faults fall across a share of it: the whispered voices of Risingson, Inertia Creeps and the title track are narrow instruments, several loops are held long, and the second half’s arrangements are plainer than the first’s.

Score: 8.9 / 10

One law governs the record: desire pressed under dread, at a slow pulse, in a closed room at night. The two most distant elements obey it. Teardrop, the most open and luminous track, sets love as action over a heartbeat; Inertia Creeps, the densest and most abrasive, sets love as a creeping, sleepless betrayal; the pulse under both is the same. Horace Andy’s reggae voice in Man Next Door, Fraser’s singing and the heavy guitar of Group Four are all bent to one pressure, and five voices across eleven tracks never break it. What holds the figure: the range is narrow, one tempo band and one mood, and narrowness is not coherence; and Man Next Door obeys by treatment more than by its own matter.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held, as paranoia, wakefulness and desire. The couple is held across the record, in devotion, affair and betrayal, and it is the record’s ground. The city is held as night, a neighbour through the wall, a room. Watching and being watched run through the record as a felt condition, not a placed one. The body is present as pulse and intoxication. The family, labour, history, the state, the sacred beyond a word and the natural order beyond a beetle and a fire are absent. One mood joins the orders the record has, and it has few: one condition, rendered at length. That is what holds the figure lowest.

Score: 7.3 / 10