Rating: * * * *
Verdict: Bristol's Massive back on track
While Massive Attack's fifth album doesn't have the anthemic tunes of early albums Blue Lines and Protection, nor the enchanting dark heaviness of Mezzanine, it meets somewhere in the middle, making it a return to form for the Bristol band.
Those three classic albums - released throughout the 90s - were quite a benchmark to set for themselves and Heligoland is never going to eclipse them. However, with the personal spats, creative differences, and record company politics that haunted previous and patchy album, 100th Window, gone, Massive Attack are back on track.
Now made up of a core of Robert Del Naja (aka 3D) and Grant Marshall (Daddy G) the lads still have pulling power, with a fleet of guests on board, including Blur/Gorillaz main man Damon Albarn, a couple of TV On the Radio blokes, and long-time collaborators Martina Topley Bird, reggae great Horace Andy, and multi-instrumentalist Neil Davidge.
The off-putting element for many is likely to be how the album conjures up an atmosphere, rather than a catchy song-by-song trip like the first three albums did.
But there's a might of energy in Massive Attack's atmospherics.
Fittingly, and perhaps predictably, the album starts darkly with the funky funeral waltz of Pray For Rain featuring TV On the Radio's Tunde Adebimpe. But then, three-quarters of the way through the song, it lightens up and takes off on to a much sweeter and spacier plain.
The last half of the album - especially the whispy mantra of Psyche and the paranoia-inducing Flat of the Blade - is a mix of stoic weirdness and beauty, making for some of the most unusual and alien sounds they have ever created.
There's a freshness to the shifting textures, succulent strings, and beautifully brittle vocals of Hope Sandoval on Paradise Circus; Babel has a penetrating pulse with layers of crackling distortion, suctioning broken beats, and Topley-Birds child-like vocals.
Albarn's Saturday Come Slow is a continuation of his dreamy work with The Good, The Bad and The Queen and Rush Minute is equal in creepiness to Inertia Creeps.
Then there's the churning stunner Girl I Love You, featuring Horace Andy.
It's as good as anything they have done, putting it up there in the dark-yet-lovely stakes alongside Unfinished Sympathy and Teardrop.
