Massive Attack: Heligoland (original) (raw)

For their first three albums, you could count on Massive Attack to make music that was as intense as it was graceful. As the moods of their albums gradually transitioned from refined soul to grimy abrasion on Blue Lines, Protection, and Mezzanine, they used that balance to toy with the emotional structure of their sound. The result was some of the decade's most haunting, forward-thinking music. Depending on how and when you listen, the same Massive Attack song can creep you out, fill you with sorrow, or send you into a deep reverie. The best ones do it all at once.

Many fans consider what little music Massive Attack released since Mezzanine to be a retreat of sorts, and it's true that they may have lost something with each original member that split off-- namely the hip-hop sensibility of Andrew "Mushroom" Vowles and the frigid snarl of Grant "Daddy G" Marshall. Their next release, 2003's 100th Window, seemed like a creative holding pattern brought on by the group's personnel situation, but it did have a few moments of sinister beauty. _Heligoland_-- the first non-soundtrack Massive Attack album in seven years and the first with Daddy G back on board in 12-- misses that quality. The undercurrent of menace and sadness that defined Massive Attack's best music is largely absent, replaced with a drowsy, half-formed gloom that, if anything, suggests resignation instead of dread.

Last fall's Splitting the Atom EP offered a couple of warning signs that reappear on this album. "Pray for Rain" is a woozy, overlong dirge redeemed only by Tunde Adebimpe's rich voice, the only instrument that bothers with anything approaching dynamics. And the EP's title track, which reunited the voices of Daddy G, Horace Andy, and Robert "3D" Del Naja over achy-kneed downtempo electro, just blithely rotates in place alongside a dead-eyed organ riff like a beat-to-shit merry-go-round. The potential of both these tracks-- strong vocalists carrying a sense of weariness over bleak ambiance-- is sabotaged by the music's unwillingness to rise, crest, and fall, to shift momentum or volume, to do anything more than sulk in the background with its hands in its pockets, kicking at the ground.