ComfortComes

Review: Massive Attack – Heligoland

Their last real album was released seven long years ago, so the hype you can slice with a knife that has been surrounding Massive Attack’s latest offering since the 6 months prior to its release is understandable.

Is it?
Is it, really?

Let’s face it: Massive Attack are never gong to be able to pull another Mezzanine or another Blue Lines. However the longer the gap between successive albums, the more the ‘OH MY GOD it’s going to be EPIC’ mentality sets in and that is the worst mentality that can be cultivated, because it is inevitably going to end in disappoint especially when the epic-est albums are long gone and untouched.

And Heligoland is by no means a bad album. It sounds just like Massive Attack and Massive Attack just sounds like 1996 and as a result Heligoland, despite the multitude of collaborators adorning its tracks, comes across looking a little out of its depth. A little old-fashioned. A little quaint.

Don’t get me wrong – ‘Pray for Rain’ is a great track, probably the best on the album. But Heligoland tries so hard to be Mezzanine and it’s not going to be Mezzanine. What made Mezzanine so good was how it was so DIFFERENT from whatever was around at the time. It was even different from Blue Lines. But here you have the single – ‘Splitting the Atom’ – which is an extension of the last thirty seconds of ‘Exchange’. ‘Girl I Love You’ has already been equated with ‘Angel’ on numerous unrelated reviews – a stance I strove to disagree with, but the resemblance stares you in the face when it comes on, even before you know what song is playing. The album itself sounds a little bit blasé – a bit “Yeah, we’re Massive Attack, we make pretty sounds and we can get Damon Albarn and Mazzy Star to sing over them for us.” To be fair, ‘Paradise Circus’ is probably the most contemporarily relevant song on the album and it also rather good.

Something happens when ‘Rush Minute’ kicks in and Robert Del Naja’s all too familiar voice shows up. You wonder why Massive Attack even bother with collabs, or why said collabs have to be such a big deal when there’s a perfectly decent set of pipes already in the band – one way more characteristic of a resurrection than all the Mazzys and Damons would ever be.

It’s a pretty cool story, though, the one about how Heligoland artwork isn’t allowed to be displayed down in the London Underground because it looks too much like graffiti – or ‘street art’ as the politically correct term goes, the one that they then proceed to outlaw. Anyway, summarising the album itself – it’s good, but it’s outdated.