It's one of the oddities of the entertainment world that when movie soundtracks don't get released as part of a well-coordinated multimedia blitz, they tend to get released at random. Score enthusiasts can still wait months after a film's première for the accompanying album to hit stores, if it appears at all. Massive Attack's score for Danny The Dog reverses that trend, although fans of the film may never notice: Released last November, it predated the film by six months. (Danny The Dog is now scheduled for release in April 2005, under a new name, Unleashed.)
The plot of the Luc Besson-produced action film apparently involves a man (Jet Li) rebelling against the no-goodniks who raised him from birth to behave like a dog, apart from his supreme fighting skills. Somehow, Morgan Freeman and Bob Hoskins also fit into the picture. The music's role remains to be seen, although it works relatively well on its own as a solid, if minor, entry in the Massive Attack discography. The problem is that Massive Attack—now consisting of Neil Davidge and Robert Del Naja—hasn't really trafficked in minor material before, and it seems at a lost as to how to put its distinctive stamp on made-to-order music.
The all-instrumental album mostly steers clear of both the trip-hop sound that Massive Attack pioneered and the chilly extremes to which Davidge and Del Naja took that sound on 2003's unjustly overlooked 100th Window. For Danny, they mostly borrow, bringing in aggressive, aerobicized techno noise for fast tracks like "Atta Boy" and "Simple Rules," and eerie ambient soundscapes for most every other track. As the soundtrack to a Jet Li movie, it's daring stuff, and it might set just the right mood for Danny The Dog, Unleashed, or whatever title the film ends up with when it sees the light of day. At the moment, however, it sounds like a sidestep from an act that's made a career of pushing forward.