If you make a game-changing album like Blue Lines, you’re going to find yourself with a right old surfeit of slack.

This means you’ve got carte blanche to slap muzak horrors Weather Storm and Heat Miser on the follow-up, and nearly get away with a Light My Fire that rather pisses on it instead. You can bloodymindedly stick to a zombie’s pace on third album Mezzanine, and pick up plaudits which still ring out a decade later for the archetypal four-good-tracks-and-a-heap-of-filler. Christ, you can even offer up tepid audio scowl 100th Window and still not get harried out of town. That was a decade of regression, peppered with the odd dramatic highpoint, yet ending with chipper old 3-D brooding in Daddy G’s absence.

But mittens to history. G’s back, Horace Andy’s still there and even Martine Topley-Bird’s dropped in now the coast is clear. It’s a quirky full circle. And Heligoland is good, Mezzanine-good – by which we mean nearly-Risingson-good and not Group-Four-good. Tunde Adebimpe brings TV On The Radio’s soul/tricksy fusion to Pray For Rain, Hope Sandoval adds saucily whispered consonants to the creepy Paradise Circus, Guy Garvey lends his peculiar mix of belated recognition and perplexing overratedness to the glitchy, Burial-meets-Japan’s-Ghosts Flat Of The Blade and poor Damon Albarn sounds desperate on Saturday Comes Slow.

It’s not all about the guests. The 3-D/DG/HA triple-header Splitting The Atom is a blast from the past, and 3-D’s pulsating Atlas Air is almost enjoyable. As enjoyable as a fellow snarling “tourniquet will keep its grip” over eerie piped synth can be, granted.

Biggest cheer though goes to Horace Andy and his brilliant travesty of his own Girl I Love You. Appendectomising bass underpins a thrilling, Curve-y, grim deflowering of a once pretty ditty. Super. So the Massive have scrabbled around and found a bit of mojo again; Heligoland isn’t swimming in sunshine optimism, but it leavens the customary dub panic attacks with grace, invention and the generous realisation there are still people out there who are worth the bother.