Let's start with an acknowledgment: selling out five nights at the Brixton Academy when you haven't been around for nigh on five years is no small achievement. Especially given that Massive Attack just released an album that, by most people's admission, is by no means their best. But, despite the lurching, monochrome dubscapes that populate the first part of tonight's show, the bank holiday crowd receive these icons of alienation with the kind of euphoria usually reserved for visiting rock legends.
But, not for Massive Attack the crowd-pleasing excursion through the singalong classics, not yet anyhow. First we have to confront the skunk-fuelled paranoia of one Robert Del Naja as expressed through sonic murk, shadowy posturing and, most powerfully, a gigantic dot matrix display. This, covering the entire back wall of the Academy stage, plays the role of both 'visuals' and a running commentary of slogans ("War for peace is like fucking for virginity."). As the tracks dip and swell the dot matrix whirs with internet chat, sixth-form politics and the totems of 'media overload' - weather reports, celebrity 'news', endless statistics.
The themes are war, surveillance, personal liberty, freedom of speech and the files that THEY are keeping on YOU. Del Naja conjures an inhuman, detached and tragically depersonalised experience of moral judgement but he's been there and tonight you may just have to trust him on this one. For now, this is his show and as a spell-binding 'Inertia Creeps' surges free from the mire and an ascending list of figures for national military spending cascades down the screen, it's a captivating experience.
It's revealing, however, that the eternally mumbling Del Naja leaves the stage tonight whenever a crowd-favourite gets an airing from guest vocalists Horace Andy, Dot Allison and Debbie Miller. One of Massive Attack's great strengths is their often-remarked ability to pick perfectly unique collaborators. In this context, though, it's something of an Achilles heel as imitating the idiosyncrasies of Sinead O'Connor and Elizabeth Fraser proves a thankless task. Nonetheless, you are struck once again by the significance of the musical upheaval that took place in Bristol during the early Nineties as Massive and others systematically dismantled the notion of 'the band' and the generic limits usually imposed upon them and emerged as fluid soundsystems.
Back then, a rock press searching for the comfort of the familiar found a natural hero in Tricky, whose performance and single-minded musical vision twisted the soundsystem dynamic into familiar auteurist focus. Now, the increasingly single-minded and centre stage figure in Massive Attack - Del Naja - remains a reluctant and somewhat grim-faced frontman. Daddy G makes only fleeting appearances.
Winding things up with the eventual concession to 'Blue Lines' - 'Hymn of the Big Wheel', 'Safe From Harm' and the mighty 'Unfinished Sympathy' - makes an odd fit with the collective's 2003 incarnation. It's a little like an uninvited visit from the Brand New Heavies, but welcome all the same. Like dispatches from another time they remind us that, as a collaborative soundsystem, Massive Attack were able to sidestep any tendency to become dominated by a particular vision, sound and style.
Del Naja has strayed some considerable distance from this kind of dynamic and perhaps become too in thrall to the outdated notion of 'the band' that this act should have helped to banish over a decade ago. It's difficult to figure if he has finally conquered his demons with '100th Window' but, for the sake of Massive Attack, you might hope so.
