At Malkin Bowl on Saturday, May 29

It takes a hell of a show to make an audience forget that it’s been standing in a muddy field in the rain for several hours as the night grows ever more chilly. Massive Attack, fortunately, provided exactly that when it made its long-overdue return to Vancouver at a sold-out Malkin Bowl. The Bristol, U.K.–based act, which hasn’t played here since 1995, delivered a set that was career-spanning, if a little too short—but more on that later.

Massive Attack has historically shunned the label “trip-hop”, and justifiably so. The group has always been too singularly experimental to be pigeonholed so easily. Live, however, the band is certainly trippy, but more in a hypnotic sense than a psychedelic one. Anchored by a downright monumental rhythm section consisting of bassist Winston Blissett and drummers Damon Reece and Julien Brown, the band seemed telepathically tight, even as it indulged in extended instrumental sections that allowed guitarist Angelo Bruschini to wring gnarly feedback and crushing distortion out of his rig.

The concert was just as arresting visually as it was musically. Vertical strips of LEDs across the back of the stage displayed images as well as information (or propaganda, depending on your point of view). The latter included statistics on everything from Hurricane Katrina’s death toll to the quantity of oil currently being spilled into the Gulf of Mexico on a daily basis. Not very uplifting, perhaps, but Massive Attack has always favoured its dark side, which it most fully embraced on 1998's Mezzanine, an album that remains a cultural touchstone for an entire generation of knitted-brow brooders.

That isn’t to say that de facto frontman Robert “3D” Del Naja doesn’t enjoy his work. Del Naja acted as both performer and master of ceremonies, introducing a rotating cast of vocalists that included his Massive Attack cofounder Grant “Daddy G” Marshall, soul diva Deborah Miller, reggae veteran Horace Andy, and onetime Tricky cohort Martina Topley-Bird, who opened the show with a solo set.

Of them all, it was Andy for whom the audience showed its most clamorous appreciation, and for good reason. The 59-year-old Jamaican’s signature vibrato is a thing of wonder. Of course, it didn’t hurt that, backing him on “Angel”, the band tore into the volume swells with an intensity that was a few notches above even its best recordings. If Malkin Bowl had a roof, that mother would have been well and truly torn off.

And if that song didn’t do it, the closing number would have. “Atlas Air”, led by an unusually animated 3D, built up to a propulsive, bottom-heavy groove while the LEDs flashed national flags interspersed with corporate logos. (You don’t have to be Noam Chomsky to figure out the symbolism there.) The song wound down with keyboardist John Baggott playing the snaky main riff by himself before the band filed off-stage.

As for disappointments, well, it seems the group had to cut a few songs to make the 10 p.m. curfew imposed by Stanley Park. Fair enough; the squirrels need their sleep, after all. But fans who have been waiting since 1995 to hear Massive Attack play “Karmacoma” (which has been the final encore at every other date on this tour) would surely have braved a few more minutes of drizzle for that privilege, squirrels be damned.