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Massive Attack is less a band than a cloud of free-floating anxiety. Its members, Robert Del Naja (or 3D) and Grant Marshall (Daddy G), are pioneers of the trip-hop that emerged from clubs in Bristol, England, in the late 1980s. (A third founder, Andy Vowles, aka Mushroom, left in 1999.)
Massive Attack worked like a reggae sound system and production team, collaborating with singers. The Bristol sound, from Massive Attack and associates like Soul II Soul and Tricky, was cavernous, shadowy and foreboding -- not party music, but a premonition of the burned-out, dread-infused morning after. "Fish like little silver knives/Make the cuts on my inside," Del Naja sings in Atlas Air, on the band's new album.
But Massive Attack evades trip-hop basics for most of the new CD, Heligoland, its first studio album since 2003. (The title recalls a German archipelago in the North Sea.) The group has largely sworn off deep bass, making for its crispest, most transparent productions but losing a lot of atmospheric murk. Its sound is also less personalized than ever. Various tracks might be mistaken for Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails or TV on the Radio (with Tunde Adebimpe from that band taking lead vocals on the opening song, Pray for Rain).
What unites Heligoland is Massive Attack's love of repetition, its way of transforming arrangements near the end of a song and its somber attitude about love and world affairs. Marshall's deep voice talk-sings through the bitter Splitting the Atom, with observations like "The jobless return/the bankers have bailed"; unfortunately, it's set to a mechanized music-hall beat that's merely drab.
Guests draw more out of Massive Attack. The reggae singer Horace Andy, a regular with the band, croons about thwarted romance in Girl I Love You between an insistent double-time bass line and a wasp's nest of horns. For Damon Albarn, from Blur, Massive Attack constructs a ravaged version of Britpop grandeur (via Radiohead) in Saturday Come Slow as he muses, "Do you love me?/Is there nothing there?"
Flat of the Blade, featuring Guy Garvey of Elbow, has looping, ratcheting electronics, hints of a dance beat, hummed vocal overdubs and a brass ensemble; it could be a Bjork production of Robert Wyatt. Martina Topley Bird, who sang with Tricky, appears in Babel, a skeletal rocker, and Psyche, with hypnotic arpeggios bouncing between stereo channels. Hope Sandoval, from Mazzy Star, whispers about love and sin in Paradise Circus, as the track evolves from minimal vibraphone and piano chords through a reggae vamp to a string-laden elegy.
Heligoland comes across as an anthology rather than an album. It's a dour collection of concepts and strategies -- some successful -- as Massive Attack ponders what to do after trip-hop.
