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Track List
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Seven years after their last album, Massive Attack return to find a musical landscape very much touched by their influence. Following on from Portishead's sinisterly brilliant comeback last year, and the mutation of trip-hop to dubstep (indeed, the genre's brightest star, Burial, is to remix several tracks from Heligoland), all the signs are that Robert "3D" Del Naja and Grant "Daddy G" Marshall remain as vital as they've ever been.
It's borne out by the list of guest names littering the sleeve of Heligoland. They've always found talented people to work with, but a cast list including Guy Garvey, Damon Albarn and Hope Sandoval is almost guaranteed to have any music fan worth their salt salivating.
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.
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