Blue Lines by Massive Attack
Blue Lines is the debut album by English trip hop group Massive Attack, released on 8 April 1991 by Virgin Records. Blue Lines is generally considered the first trip hop album, although the term was not widely used before circa 1994. The album was a success in the United Kingdom, reaching #13 in the albums chart; sales were limited elsewhere. A fusion of electronic music, hip hop, dub, '70s soul and reggae, the album established Massive Attack as one of the most innovative British bands of the 1990s and the founder of trip hop's Bristol Sound. Music critic Simon Reynolds stated that the album also marked a change in electronic/dance music, "a shift toward a more interior, meditational sound. The songs on Blue Lines run at 'spliff' tempos - from a mellow, moonwalking 90 beats per minute ...down to a positively torpid 67 bpm." The group also drew inspiration from concept albums in various genres by artists such as Pink Floyd, Public Image Ltd., Billy Cobham, Herbie Hancock and Isaac Hayes. Blue Lines featured breakbeats, sampling, and rapping on a number of tracks, but the design of the album differed from traditional hip hop. Massive Attack approached the American-born hip hop movement from an underground British perspective and also incorporated live instruments into the mixes. It features the vocals of Shara Nelson and Horace Andy, along with the rapping of Tricky Kid. Blue Lines proved to be popular in the club scene, as well as on college radio stations.
<b>100 Best Albums</b> From the first whispers of whistling wind, driving basslines and sludgy, slowed breakbeats, the sound of Massive Attack’s 1991 debut is unmistakably theirs. Rooted in the musical culture of Bristol, England, at the turn of the 20th century’s final decade, <i>Blue Lines</i> absorbs the port city’s soundsystem vibrations, industrial grit and post-punk harshness to produce nine tracks of unsettling nocturnal introspection. Starting out as DJ and MC collective The Wild Bunch, Robert Del Naja, Andrew Vowles, Grant “Daddy G” Marshall and Adrian “Tricky” Thaws began turning their hand to production in the late ’80s, thanks to a collaboration with local singer Neneh Cherry on her 1989 single “Manchild”. Encouraged by Cherry and her partner, producer Cameron McVey, the quartet soon adopted the moniker Massive Attack and holed up in one of Cherry’s spare rooms to begin work on what would become <i>Blue Lines</i>. Inspired by the reggae music of the Caribbean diaspora in Bristol as much as by nascent UK rap pioneered by artists like Rodney P and the dub-punk of local heroes The Pop Group, Massive Attack forged a record of remarkable clarity, clothed in the paranoid fug of weed smoke. Opener “Safe From Harm” sets the tone, pairing Shara Nelson’s soulful vocals with record-scratches and a thundering rhythm section, while De Naja delivers a typically anxious hook: “I was looking back to see if you were looking back at me to see me looking back at you.” This tension between unease and harmony continues throughout, simmering in the jazz shuffle of the title track as Tricky drawls menacingly, or weaving through the dub bass and counterpoint of singer Horace Andy’s soaring falsetto on “Five Man Army”. Ultimately, it is on the group’s most well-known track, “Unfinished Sympathy”, that they reach their apotheosis. Pairing luscious string orchestrations with eerie vocal samples and Nelson’s yearning vocal lamenting an unrequited love, Massive Attack create five minutes of soul music that stirs as much as it soothes. The group would go on to be labelled innovators of a new laid-back genre called “trip-hop”, spawning dozens of imitators and hundreds of chill-out playlists. Yet, there is nothing relaxed about <i>Blue Lines</i>: Amid its euphoric melodies is an ominous vocal, and between its groove there is a bassline breaking almost to distortion. On this pioneering debut there is always a reason to look back over your shoulder.
