Critic's Review
Dave Thompson, All Music Guide
Sparse packaging dispenses not only with any kind of booklet or inlay card, it doesn't even have a cover. Eleven Promos is delivered in a clear plastic DVD case, with a simple sticker at the top offering up the barest bones information -- the track listing shares space with the bar code, a Parental Advisory flash with the technical details. In an age when brighter and gaudier is often considered bigger and better, Eleven Promos strips our expectations down to the minimum, and then keeps going. Which, of course, is how Massive Attack have always operated. Three albums in a decade spawned the 11 videos here, and if the group's choice of singles ("Inertia," "Sly," "Teardrop," "Protection") has often seemed obtuse by prevailing commercial standards, their vision of video only amplifies the principle. Though the videos here are viewed through the eyes of no less than six directors (Baillie Walsh, Stephanie Sednaoul, Michel Gondry, Jonathan Glazer, Walter Stern, and Wiz), common phobic elements recur with insistent regularity -- corridors and enclosed spaces, pursuit and imprisonment, mundanity and grime. It's a disquieting world, relentlessly haunting the edge of pure terror and all the more so effective because it never quite steps over the line -- a fact which "Karmacoma" alone acknowledges, with its direct hijacking of one of the most frightening elements of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. Elsewhere, the fear is in the eye of the beholder -- open-fronted elevators and short-circuiting electrical sockets, stalkers and madmen and crowds (oh my). And so a band rehearses while a chainsaw killer buzzes at the door, a house with no walls reveals the lives of its inmates, a near-skeletal stripper bares all on a tackily sequinned stage, a fetus floats in a dirty blood soup. Crowds follow complete strangers for no apparent reason, and in almost every video, time, that most relentless enemy of every living thing, is slowed to a heartbeat shuffle, all the better to savor the dark anticipation. Credits at the beginning of each video acknowledge the directors and locations that brought the beast to life, but aside from that, no extra features adorn the disc, no flashy bonuses or extraneous treats. Eleven Promos is exactly that. At least until you lift the lid and peer closely in at its contents.
