Massive Attack - 'Boots On The Ground' ft. Tom Waits
Massive Attack and Tom Waits collaborate on evocative song ‘Boots On The Ground’.
Opening with his unmistakable anguished, gravel-like tone, Tom Waits sings: ‘Brown, mean and young, dumb and full of cum / What can you use a Marine for?’. This bleakly sets the tone of this powerful collaboration with vehement Pro-Palestine trip hop veterans Massive Attack, their ominous instrumentals combining with a haunting, hypnotic effect to really stir the soul with its no holes barred lyrical rawness.
As Tom Waits so eloquently himself described their collaboration: “One day many years ago, I accepted an invitation from Massive Attack to collaborate. Their long release delay never worried me. Today, as in all of mankind's yesterdays, guarantees this type of song will never go out of style. Man's folly of fiascos is a feast for the flies.”
Waits’ first original music in some fifteen years, this release marks a hard hitting return at time when such an artist feels essential to try and find meaning in a world fraught with unspeakable violence. The song will undoubtedly strike a chord with many as it tries to make sense of such atrocity with unapologetically graphic lyricism.
In classic Massive Attack fashion, the unsettling heavy breathing that opens the song is typical of their often unnerving sound that feels very apt given the subject matter of extreme violence. Unlike their more mellow signature hits such as 'Teardrop' and 'Protection', this release, their first since 2020 is far from therapeutic, reflecting a much darker mood totally befitting of the current state of hostility in the world, particularly in the Middle East.
As the band evocatively summarise in a recent interview talking about the song: “Across the western hemisphere, state authoritarianism and the militarisation of police forces are fusing again with neo-fascist politics. Seen within the American emergency, at home and overseas, this track contains pulses of callous impulse and abandoned mind."
The marching-like sound effects with the clanging noise of weapons and the gloomy piano truly evokes a sense of impending chaos that chills you to the bone alongside the video's powerful black and white images of war. This is by no means easy listening, and Tom Waits and Massive Attack have produced an a profoundly unsettling work that is an ode to a very disturbing state of affairs.
By Brendan Sharp
