Massive Attack
100th Window

The Hundredth Window.

3D (Robert del Naja) is left alone, the dark soul (Mushroom and Daddy G) has been lost along the way. What remains is the white, cold, and electronic soul.
All the songs start slow, dreamy, lost in space, with long intros laid on delicate keyboard textures. "Future Proof" begins with some bleeps, a real guitar arpeggio kicks in, and then 3D sings, no hint of rap, he actually sings, with a glacial voice lost in effects, merged into the music which is freeform, minimal, with structures repeated ad libitum. Sometimes there’s a real bass played almost ambient-like, strings caressed. A spectral nightmare. The old Massive can only be recognized in some drum machine programming.

The main female guest this time is Sinead O’Connor, beautiful in “Special Cases”, but in “Prayer For England” and “What Your Soul Sings” she makes one long for Liz Frazer and Tracey Thorn, her voice uses vibrato too extensively, remains a foreign body, sometimes irritating, far from Frazer's majesty and Thorn's weary nonchalance.
The old Horace Andy sings in “Name Taken” and it's only here that the old Massive are immediately recognizable, Horace Andy's voice is inimitable. A unique continuity with the past.

“Small Time Shot Away” is our favorite and “Antistar” closes the album, made of emptiness, minimal, sparse, delicate loops that repeat in the infinite of its 20-minute duration, it is hard to find something to cling to, you shouldn't resist but lose yourself inside, where the strings of “Unfinished Sympathy" have transformed into oriental melodies, and here it is worth remembering the fierce opposition of 3D, manifested on the band’s website, to the upcoming war in Iraq: fusion of cultures rather than clash.

An odd work that will baffle longtime fans, those more into trip hop and dub, but a beautiful and experimental work. Difficult.
This is the new path taken by Massive Attack.