Friday, October 10, 2008

704. Massive Attack - Blue Lines (1991)
















Track Listing

1. Safe From Harm
2. One Love
3. Blue Lines
4. Be Thankful For What You've Got
5. Five Man Army
6. Unfinished Sympathy
7. Daydreaming
8. Lately
9. Hymn Of The Big Wheel

Review

If we compare the house music we had yesterday with the KLF with this album we can find some similarities and differences. One of the similarities is the fact that both albums are pretty dated, the whole trip-hop scene, as good as it was has not dated well. One of the big dissimilarities between this and the
White Room by KLF is that this is a pretty great album irrespective of how dated it is.

This is truly revolutionary stuff, and even if I only caught the end of trip-hop properly, from the second Portishead album on, I still have great memories of the music and the time. This was pretty smart, chilled and beautiful electronic music and the influence of Blue Lines cannot be overestimated, this is the blueprint for all trip-hop to come.

That said there are excellent tracks here, Unfinished Sympathy and Safe From Harm are only the most famous examples, the whole album stands up as a work of high quality. The sampling and scratching techniques are highly original but unfortunately this is an album very much of its time, trip-hop has run its course. But this album still deserves a place in my iPod.

Track Highlights

1. Unfinished Sympathy
2. Safe From Harm
3. One Love
4. Be Thankful For What You've Got

Final Grade

9/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

Daddy G says about the making of the album: "We were lazy Bristol twats. It was Neneh Cherry who kicked our arses and got us in the studio. We recorded a lot at her house, in her baby's room. It stank for months and eventually we found a dirty nappy behind a radiator. I was still DJing, but what we were trying to do was create dance music for the head, rather than the feet. I think it's our freshest album, we were at our strongest then."

Unfinished Sympathy:


3 comments:

Lachlan Willis said...

Hey Francisco, once you've gone through all 1001 albums, can you do like a follow up kinda thing at the end? I'd love to hear some stuff about you saying what albums you believe shouldnt have been in there, and what albums you would have put in instead.

I just thought about it because Massive Attack had a very glaring omission from the list with Mezzanine, and i think you would agree?

Francisco Silva said...

Lachlan: Yeah I am kind of planning to do a big follow-up to the whole thing, with stats, opinions, re-thinks of albums that are better or worse in hindsight and also glaring omissions/ stupid inclusions. So we have that to look forward to!

Francisco Silva said...

Oh and Mezzanine is a stupid omission.