The group who single-handedly created the woozy, sexual, cinematic, and meditative dance genre known as trip-hop with their 1991 masterpiece Blue Lines later went on to craft gorgeous soundtrack music and generally emerge as one of the most forward-thinking, fastidious, and s-l-o-w production teams in pop music. Collected, a best-of compilation straddling the group's career, is the kind of ...
Manufacturer: Virgin
The collaboration of studio whiz Geoff Barrow and singer Beth Gibbons, Dummy was made at the same time as a short film noir called To Kill a Dead Man, and the same approach--gloomy, tormented, and wildly melodramatic--permeates the album. "Sour Times" (the hit in which Gibbons cries, again and again, "Nobody loves me, it's true") and the more cryptic "Glory Box" are the ...
Manufacturer: Universal / Island
By the release of 1998's Mezzanine, critics were suddenly of the understanding that Massive Attack were one of the most important bands in the world. Bristol's original trip-hop pioneers had, on previous albums Blue Lines and Protection, fused turntable wizardry to the warmest of soul. With Mezzanine, however, the party had ended; revisiting the murky soundscapes so ...
Manufacturer: Wild Bunch
The critical and commercial triumphs of Portishead, Tricky and Roni Size have established Bristol as a centre of slow-burning creativity, but it was the staggering impact Massive Attack made with their debut album which first put the West Country town on the musical map and made reluctant superstars of Mushroom, 3-D and Daddy G. Blue Lines provided a blueprint for the sound which would ...
DJ Shadow, a.k.a. Josh Davis, could be credited with bringing newfound introspection to the gloating sounds of hip-hop. Condensed with urban oscillations and scatological beats, Endtroducing... shutters with eclectic samples and aural montages that reach beyond the constraints of hip-hop style. Enhancing the mix with fundamentals of rock, soul, funk, ambient, and jazz, the modern fusions ...
With Dummy, their 1994 debut, Portishead not only created a classic of turntable-derived soul, but defined their sound so exhaustively as to spawn a host of imitators. So what to do for a follow-up? As it happened, the answer was simple--refine the template. This self-titled album simply ups the ante on everything that made their debut so special: the brooding sense of menace, that deep ...
By the late 1990s Vienna production duo Richard Dorfmeister and Peter Kruder had firmly established themselves as remixers par excellence, selecting key elements of other people's compositions and rebuilding them in their unique framework, which saw a collusion of Latin, dub and bossa. This outing on K7 collates their finest works in a double CD set, and though compiled in the spirit of DJ Kicks ...
Manufacturer: K7
Motion, the debut album from DJ Jason Swinscoe's Cinematic Orchestra, is a future jazz classic. Each track perfectly marries mood and substance, mixing shuffling percussion and galloping drum breaks with chilled pianos, melancholy strings and live jazz horns. Heavy acoustic basslines mingle with samples of old blues singers and twinkly electric piano solos. It's a dark, late night brew that ...
Manufacturer: Ninja Tune
Bristol's Massive Attack released a classic with their first album, Blue Lines, but only those who were paying careful attention noticed for a while; then, after everybody caught on, they were overshadowed by the likes of colleagues Portishead, who were cooler. But not so after the release of Protection, which sported a massive hit and was just as critically acclaimed as their first ...
Adrian Thaws (aka Tricky), one of the key components of Massive Attack around the time of their important Blue Lines album, seemed to find more space to explore his fears, loves and neuroses as a solo artist on this, his debut release, which is also something of a classic itself. Whilst the Massive Attack sound is a standard one of dub basses, Tricky gains greater contrast with his smoky ...
