Massive Attack – 100th Window

Massive Paranoia

Listening to Massive Attack’s fourth studio album, “100th Window”, is like listening to the soundtrack to someone’s bad dream. And once you’ve stepped into a Massive Attack album, it’s almost impossible to wake yourself up. This time the Bristol collective have created a study in trip-hop paranoia that leaves you both perplexed and subdued by the end of the disc.The album’s opener, “Future Proof,” sounds as if it was lifted from a scene straight out of a David Lynch movie which comes complete with 3-D’s (a.k.a. Robert del Naja) raspy and haunting voice. Horace Andy, a regular on the previous albums, lends his high-pitched ragga crooning to the haunting ballads “Everywhen” and “Name Taken” which seem to drift along way too long for their own good. Horace is a wonderful singer whose voice soars across the band’s complex production, however these two songs do him no justice. So it is up to Sinead O’Connor to balance out the album. Her contributions are the disc’s standouts (particularly “A Prayer for England”) but the album has a misguided feeling that can’t be shaken. Although 3-D’s production is still unbelievably brilliant, he fails to live up to the level of his previous work.