Massive Attack: 100 Window

By RUSSELL BAILLIE

(Herald rating: * * * )

The good news with the release of Massive Attack's fourth album proper is the group's return here next month. As anyone who saw their dazzling performance three years ago knows, this is one studio outfit who can really put on a show. One whose mix of high drama and deep-throb confirms them as the Pink Floyd of Brit-dance.

The bad news is, well, this, their latest album. Rather than yet another innovative standard-setter, it feels like a slight extension of their last, 1998's Mezzanine on which the Brit-soul, dub and hip-hop mix of its predecessors Blue Lines and Protection came rubbed by wiry guitars and samples of the Cure and Velvet Underground.

And while past albums have made a virtue of their guest vocalists, this one relies on the all-too familiar.

There's the "you-talkin-to-me" mumblings of group kingpin Robert 3D Del Naja on a few of the nine tracks; the sweet-if-monotone warblings of reggae veteran and MA regular Horace Andy; and to really let the good times roll, Sinead O'Connor turns up on three. While some of her better performances are to be found on other people's albums, here she overstays her welcome, especially when she's indulging in a spot of cross-burning in the dreadfully pained A Prayer for England.

But at least that track has the virtue of a chorus and a hydraulic bassline which gives the music some fire when so much of the rest of this feels languid, wintry and oddly cluttered in its arrangements. That kitchen-sink approach is possibly a development of MA as a live band where the less-is-more studio aesthetic doesn't translate.

It also starts to remind that as ground-breaking as MA's earlier work was, they too can fall back on formula - one of bass-pulsings, rimshot snares, flanged keyboard chords which slowly coalesce beneath the floating vocal, only to go into overdrive once the singer has departed the vocal booth.

There are, however, some saving graces to 100 Windows. The central track Butterfly goes from nightmare squall into a vintage drum machine meltdown - which suggests a lasting affection for Cabaret Voltaire, those early '80s exponents of artful, austere synth-funk - complete with vaguely eastern flavour. Also evoking minarets is Antistar near the close, while the delicate What Your Soul Sings has O'Connor in spooky angel mode, making this as close as this album gets to Mezzanine's delicate, incandescent track Teardrop.

One might wonder if the group's domestic troubles - Andrew "Mushroom" Vowles left after Mezzanine - is the reason for MA's partial undoing. Or whether this is a clearing-out exercise from a confused period.

But full marks for timing - Massive Attack released their classic debut Blue Lines just as the Gulf War made their name a British radio no-no. Now the outfit, whose Del Naja has been at the forefront of British musicians' protests against the Blair Government's support of a US-led invasion of Iraq, unleash a new Massive Attack as their name readies itself as a headline once more.

Unfortunately, 100 Windows doesn't feel an album of its times as its brilliant predecessors did. It's more the sound of Massive Attack's withdrawal from the frontline.

Label: Virgin