The black magic of Massive Attack's new album

A moth to the flame is the best image to describe what it feels like listening to their fifth album, "Heligoland": bad for you, but the obsessive beats and journey-like structure of the music, compels you to go on.

"Pray for Rain" establishes at once Massive Attack's strange, often bleak but also dreamlike and always contradictory world, as a soft and hypnotic rhythm mixes with the soothing yet suspect vocals of Tunde Adebimpe.

3D and Daddy G, the remaining members of an original trio that began in the eighties, offer myriad musical genres on all the tracks, ranging from electronic, reggae, hip hop and gospel.

"Our music is primarily laboratory work", they say, describing an often solitary creative process, "computers offer an infinite number of solutions".

A few signature Massive Attack tunes feature on "Heligoland", especially "Splitting the Atom", with Robert Del Naja's voice that you never believe can go deeper, and then drops another note, or the closing "Atlas Air".

But the new album is more complex and difficult to grasp immediately.

Massive Attack's music always changes because, with no lead singer, they have used the likes of Beth Orton or Faith No More for single tracks, and always bring in other outside artists to make the music.

David Bowie and Madonna were some from the past, and this time Gorillaz main man Damon Albarn and Martina Topley-Bird join the duo.

Tremendous momentum propels each track forwards on "Heligoland", as Massive Attack treats its songs like journeys, unlike the typically circular, chorus-based structure of pop and rock songs.

The characteristic darkness of their music comes, they say, "from personal anxieties, but especially it is a metaphor for the political tensions in the world", including race relations in Britain and the Iraq war.

But religion is a more obvious thread running through the album, with allusions to praying and paradise in the songs, and the album artwork showing a sad clown's face with a rainbow hovering over its head like an oppressive halo.

"Psyche" combines electronic music with gospel singing, "Splitting the Atom", one of the tracks Damon Albarn collaborated on, has backing vocals reminiscent of church choirs and the strings at the end evoke the image of an angel rising to heaven.

Strings also come in on "Paradise Circus", again a track shuttling between an atmosphere of heaven and hell as the gravitas of the instruments is relaxed by hands clapping the beat and an electronic xylophone.

Massive Attack have done very little publicity for their new album, and instead stayed true to their roots as serious DJs: the phantoms making the music at the back of the hall while everyone else dances under the lights.

With "Heligoland", the Bristol duo will likely disappear back into the clubs and leave the music to work its black magic on listeners.