In a way, I’m an ideal reviewer for this album. I’ve never heard Massive Attack. Ever. I’m familiar with the idea of Massive Attack. They have something to do with “the 90s” and “trip-hop.” Back in Santa Fe, whenever a certain friend and I saw a flyer that said the band was trip-hop, we’d split open into stitches of laughter. So in another way, maybe I’m not a very good reviewer for Heligoland, Massive Attack’s fifth album. Without ever hearing the band, I have a caricatured notion of them, a sham-antipathy to their music.
As I listened to Heligoland I took notes on each song, but in retrospect it remains difficult for me to begin to characterize each song. “Repetitive in a bad way.” “Terrible lyrics.” “Syncopated synth bass line lifted directly from 1997.” “Sounds like a chillwave Balkan thing.” “Uninspired.” “Sounds like something from the Matrix soundtrack.” “Did he just rhyme ‘gasoline’ with ‘gasoline?’” “Reminiscent of every late-90s British band.” There were only a handful of songs that sounded like they should have been released in the last five years, and if they were physical objects, you wouldn’t need a very large hand to hold them. The unfortunately-titled “Paradise Circus” is the first (perhaps only) genuinely sexy song on an album that often aspires to “sexy” but settles for “just friends.” It has a guest vocal from Hope Sandoval, who I understand is another 90s trip-hop-ish holdover. It succeeds, though, on its own terms—a relative lack of studio meddling and a light production hand. The rest of the album pushes in ten different directions at once, creating a sort of static apoplexy. By striving for a modern sound, it wears itself out and stays stuck in the past.
Heligoland’s sheer busyness is what makes it such a disappointing album. It’s quite clear that the band looks for something that it just fails to find. Rather than the heterogenous, sophisticated album Massive Attack seemingly tried to create, they end up making a messy, old-sounding affair. Using the same synth patches and clunky bass lines they must have trotted out ten years ago, Massive Attack end up crafting an album that I can only imagine is self-derivative, canon-cannibalistic. The songs lack compelling melodies, the lyrics aren’t much better than what the average high-schooler writes in study hall, and the music is comprised of a bulky mass of undirected attitude. I don’t ever need to hear arpeggiated Spanish guitar over synth sounds and drum machines—especially with flat female vocal accompaniment. I know of a few high-end chain restaurants who would beg to differ, though.
I still don’t have any strong opinion on the band, but I suspect I don’t need any more listens to reach a fairly definitive conclusion on this album (see above). Listening to it has confirmed my every suspicion about the cottonheadedness of trip-hop as a genre, and failed to justify all the great things I’ve heard about Massive Attack. As I listened to Heligoland, I couldn’t resist comparing it to Portishead’s Third. Portishead, another band invariably pegged as trip-hop and pinned to the 90s, superseded genre and age in order to create one of the best albums of 2008, an album that sounded like absolutely nothing else around. Massive Attack’s Heligoland sounds like all the cheesiest music around—ten years ago.