Now wealthy enough to not fall foul of record company lawyers (unpaid for Nana Mouskouri samples resulted in tracks being pulled from their 2000 debut Programmed To Love), The Everlasting Blink features a series of inspired if somewhat bizarre guest stars.
With Mushroom having left the band and Daddy G taking a sabbatical from the studio to concentrate on family life, it falls to Robert Del Naja (3D) to carry forward Massive Attack into the beyond, in collaboration with Neil Davidge, the producer of their third album Mezzanine (1998).
Without Mezzanine's layers of guitar, which left some Massive Attack lovers narrowing their eyes doubtfully, 100 Windows seems at first subdued. Much as shapes only gradually reveal themselves in an initially pitch black room, so it is with this album, which takes a few listens to become accustomed to.
DIRECTED BY Peter Mullan
STARRING Nora-Jane Noone, Dorothy Duffy, Anne-Marie Duff
Opens February 21, Cert 15, 119 mins
The opening scene of Peter Mullan's award-winning social drama The Magdalene Sisters unfolds in a Dublin pub in 1964, where Guinness-stained granddads in cloth caps slap their thighs to fiddle-dee-diddle-dee music played by a lecherous priest who salivates suggestively over his bodhran while crucifixes are reflected in whisky glasses and a lusty Irish buck rapes his own cousin.
