Whenever I listen to the amazing closing track on Ride’s Nowhere album, I’m always reminded of Massive Attack. Arrangement-wise, there are more similarities then you might think if you succeed in stripping away all the bizzarro qualities of both and just examine the cores, but it’s not the aural parallels that remind me of the boys from Bristol. Instead it’s the lyric that goes “I learned the hard way/that life should be easy”.

I’ll be goddamned if that wasn’t the best Massive Attack line they never wrote.

For as long as I can remember, Massive Attack’s music has been mainly rooted in controlled frustration and paranoia. It’s like all their lives are completed jigsaw puzzles, but either there seems to be a piece missing they just can’t locate, or the finalized image isn’t what they hoped it would be. Sure there are some isolated stabs at being one of the shiny, happy people, but they’re generally clouded in a miasma of self-actualization that nearly always falls a hair short of how everything probably should be, and it’s generally a long fall back down.

Maybe that’s why each new album takes about six calendars of x’d off dates until it finally finds its way into our homes.

It’s not that all of us don’t bail on Massive Attack because we have the collective brains of African Fruit Flies, but there is something else at work here. Within the world of insanity, there is an inherent logic. By that I mean one can frequently have a perfectly intelligent conversation with an insane person if one is willing to enter that person’s world of bat-shit suppositions. This is nothing new. This is why so many people believe there is a conspiracy behind JFK’s murder, or 2012 will be a year of reckoning. Me, I don’t believe in any of that bogus stuff, but I do habitually frequent Massive Attack’s website in hopes of an official release date, as do many others, so we’re probably in the same boat as the multiple-bullet theorists or those fuck-wild Mayans, and I always end up feeling like those Japanese soldiers that continued fighting in isolation twenty years after WWII was over.

When it comes to all the music of Massive Attack, it must be understood there is an intense deliberation present here that will most likely be alive and well until the crack of doom. Sure there are instinctive reliance’s present here, but they are nearly always morphed through small, controlled spaces. To an almost compulsive degree the group has always been obsessed with manageable sizes, if it’s variables or a crapshoot you’re looking for, this is not what you’re looking for. It’s still brutally apparent to anybody who isn’t a complete idiot, this is certainly no chop-shop. All of Massive Attack’s strong material (and it’s getting increasingly difficult to find a bum cut on any album of theirs, although they are playing the odds by putting out a couple releases a decade) effortlessly glides from one segment into the next, but still with no need for appropriated analysis.

This proves to be about three-quarters true on Splitting The Atom, and I give it that simply because three out of the four tracks on the EP achieve this almost inimitable vortex into troubled placidity. The opener is the title-track, and the loop immediately reminded me of Lately, found on Blue Lines, only this time around, everything’s richer, more layered (even with sort of a sort of hand-clap rhythm that almost brought to mind the handclaps on the first Stooges album. Don’t worry, it works though), and more in the realm of neo-gothic soul than anything that might recall the trip-hop movement they are generally regarded the godfathers of (although I despise that label on every level).

It’s nice to see Splitting The Atom continue Massive Attack’s tradition of defying the odds and not resting on laurels, but I’d be lying if I said it was equal to their most impressive material, as its repetitive nature just gets a bit tacky by the end, whereas the echo of Future Proof, the opener off 100th Window left a mark a thousand years wide.

Pray For Rain however, is truly remarkable, and continues in the orchestral/experimental vein they so promisingly started with Live With Me (found on the Collected compilation). Its stuttering pianos and swirling percussion refuses to stay in one place, and I can’t imagine the brilliance of this being overshadowed by anything on LP5 (the working name for the new record).

A huge misstep comes in the form of the next track Bulletproof Love, and sounds like a rough draft of a Future Sound Of London track outline. None of it works, none of it can be applauded, and none of it will be discussed by me. Massive Attack has never been afforded the luxury to become unhinged, and here they push those limits into dangerous, vulnerable territories. It’s a plodding mess, and I have no qualms grouping it with their worst offerings to date.

So it goes without saying I was relieved to find the closing track Psyche (Flash Treatment) is so remarkable. It doesn’t have the fascinating arrangements of Pray For Rain, but the EP closes with an arctic mediation on paranoid love/pain that borders on diabolical. 100th Window, despite its layered textures and subdued approach was a million times more snarl then shrug, and while I can’t say the same for Splitting The Atom, I can say Psyche goes out with a bullet.

Like all Massive Attack music, Splitting The Atom solves a few mysteries, but points to exponentially more. This may be revolutionary music to those who have a fuzzy uneasiness with the world and now have a record to efficiently mainline, but I want something bigger, I probably deserve something bigger. After all, we’re not gluttons for punishment; we’re just tired of fighting a war that most people have stopped caring about.