• artist: massive attack
• album: heligo­land
• label: virgin records
• genre: the bristol sound is dead
• street date: feb­ruary 8^th, 2010
• web site: massiveat​tack​.com
• rating: 1.5 out of 5

there was once a time, back in the early 90s, that bristol eng­land was the hotbed of the best new elec­tronic music. acts involved were some of the biggest and most legendary names out there: portishead, tricky, roni size, smith & mighty, way out west, the wild bunch, and of course, massive attack. the sound was del­ic­ately tex­tured, layered with ground-​rippling bass, effer­ves­cent vocal­ists, for the appletini-​sipping lounge crowds and coke-​snorting dance­floor douce­bags alike. it was the golden age of british turn­tab­lists that spawned an entire genre that we now call “trip-​hop”.

massive attack, espe­cially with their 3^rd full length release, mezza­zine, back in 1998, was one of the most talked about acts. with smash hits like angel and teardrop (which would fea­ture prom­in­ently in tele­vi­sion ads and movie scores to this day), massive attack came to the fore of a music-​conscious public. it was dirty beats played over darkly tex­tured atmo­spheric reverb, a per­fectly com­ple­mentary trans­ition towards a new age that was begin­ning to grow out of the grunge-​dominated rock scene that seattle brewed.

well, those days are over. seven years after massive attack’s last release of ori­ginal material, 100^th window, heligo­land is an abject dis­ap­point­ment. it plays like a carbon copy of days gone by, which may sound like a good thing to old­school heads looking for a return to trip hop’s roots, but once the first track is played, you’ll under­stand what i mean. this is unin­spired, unima­gin­ative beat­making and i-can’t-come-up-with-anymore-good-ideas song­writing (maybe that’s why it took seven years to pro­duce). even the heavy dose of mar­tina topley-​bird, who ori­gin­ally made a name for her­self as the vocalist for tricky, cannot sal­vage this album because even she sounds bored with the material with which she has to work.

gone is the pristine pro­gram­ming, the layers of sound­scapes, the cine­matic exper­i­ence of the massive attack of old. while i have no problem with artists trying to trans­form, make new music, take things in a new dir­ec­tion, heligo­land does not seem to be trying to do that. it is a clear attempt at trying to recap­ture a 10 year old sound, and that attempt is wholly unsuc­cessful as every track plods along at an unbear­able pace, sounding utterly bored with itself, snoozing from track 1 to track 10.

one bright spot is hope san­doval (of mazzy star fame) making a sur­prise appear­ance on track 7 — para­dise circus. her trade­mark haunt­ingly beau­tiful crooning would not be out of place on a mazzy star album.