In this week’s issue of The L Magazine, I talk about Massive Attack‘s new album Heligoland, which is actually more interesting than a lot of the other stuff I’ve heard recently but nonetheless still makes me grumble a bit, not unlike Massive Attack often do themselves.

The formula behind Massive Attack’s pioneering trip-hop: the Jekyll-and-Hyde combination of Robert Del Naja’s mumbled back-alley baritone pseudo-raps and the somewhat more melodic leads, all with keyboard-laden backdrops hinting at fairly inept visions of the future. Remember that all of the above, roughly speaking, were contemporaries of movies like Hackers and The Net, artifacts from an awkward digital puberty where you’d get only one button on a mouse, if you even knew what one was in the first place.

Insofar as Heligoland still tries to be a Massive Attack record, the results are remarkable: “Rush Minute” and “Atlas Air” can stand alongside anything else this band has ever released. But those are also the only two fronted by Del Naja, and when he gives the keys to the van to guest lead vocalists, it all falls apart. The foreboding songs are usually made even more upsetting by all the confusing amorphous edges, for one thing, but these guys just enunciate too damn clearly.

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