Blue Lines - Massive Attack

Track list:

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

Running time: 45 minutes
Released: 1991

Ten years ago this would definitely have been tagged as a favourite. Now I'm not so certain. I pretty much guarantee I'll love it, but it isn't a disc I return to often. I have the original, not the remastered version and I think that I got into this through my brother - not unusual way back when; though he is younger than me he bought more music than I when we were in our teens. To think this is almost 25 years old now... its a true classic, but how does it listen this much later?

Two full albums in a day... I could be listening to this year's Mercury winner (which I need to do some point soon having picked it up, and it being an A), but the only reason I am doing this post now is that I want to hear these tunes.

The bass riff that forms the structure of Safe From Harm is iconic, Shara Nelson's vocal is amazing. Talk about setting a tone in the first 30 seconds. The periphery of the bass is incidental. There's stuff there but that riff is so strong. I have the disc of the samples that inspired Massive Attack somewhere in the future so that I can appreciate the source but there is no doubt at all that this stands as a shining example of how to sample and enhance. At 5 minutes the track feels short, compared with the tunes I listened to earlier which overstayed their welcome. I really should tag this "favourites" after all so I have. It only took 10 seconds to convince me.

Horace Andy appears for the first time on One Love. It never ceases to amaze me how many Massive Attack tunes are made or broken by this man. Either by the application of his vocal, or by virtue of being re-imaginings of songs from his past. There is a cool menace in the track here, and that combination of words is not a natural one. It's funny what the slightly tipsy brain will produce. In addition to wanting, and indulging, to listen to this now, I have a) just watched ep. 3 of London Spy - some very nice scenes - and seen trails for Luther and Line of Duty, two shows I am very pleased will reappear on screen soon. It's been a good evening in that regard.

Blue Lines sees us exposed to early Tricky for the first time, less angry here than on his own stuff. The interplay between the vocalists is nice, backed by a very chilled rhythm. Its a style that is really hard to deliver well - there is almost nothing to it in places. Many imitators since have failed to pull off the heady blend... just recently I branded Abraham lazy and faddish for their light-touch downbeat electronica. This is how to achieve that chillout goal whilst still being engaging. Do it first.

The sweet transition into Be Thankful for What You've Got is a magical moment. It's born from a pointed end to Blue Lines, and the immediate uptake of a rhythm so funky its not funny. Like much of the work that covers Horace Andy, this is not sample so much as cover, which I had never really appreciated. The original is on Protected so I'll compare and contrast in, I dunno, a decade? I am sure I've said on these pages before that I went to uni in Bristol, and in my first year there, after Massive Attack released Mezzanine I stayed late in the run-up to Christmas to see these guys play the Student Union. It remains a fond, if faded, memory. Later, when I was studying in Bath, I used to travel over to Bristol every week to game. On my way from station to location I walked through the parts of the city that spawned the Bristol Sound, and in that way you do, you think you see local celebs from time to time. Don't know if I ever really did though. Thought I saw Beth Gibbons of Portishead in a sandwich shop once too. Hah.

Five Man army comes and goes, a nice groove but really just a fill-in before the undoubted high point of Unfinished Sympathy. This really is a modern classic, a truly iconic tune in more ways than one. I get goose pimples as it starts, that off-kilter tapping, not quite tuneful bells and the sampled "hey hey hey hey". It is the start of the strings and the vocal that really set things moving though. Nelson's voice creams it, soulful and yearning, the strings speaking to loss. There is one moment at 2:24, when the piano comes in for a quick bridge that I always loved. It has less impact now, perhaps because I was so anticipating it. It's amazing the interplay between the percussion, which is tense and snappy, and the tune which is laid back and easy. They bottled something and released it here. 

Daydreaming has never really worked for me - as a concept or a song. The backing track just doesn't quite do it for me. Here the rhythm of it gets overpowering, a loop too far in terms of its impact on the experience for me... its very easy to get sucked into that beat pattern and miss everything else, which is what happened to me just now. Lately changed it up and I suddenly snapped out of a wander. This has the same problem of an over-bearing central hook, but manages it better through strings and another Nelson vocal which follows the pattern of the rhythm in an interesting way.

The album ends with another high point. The Hymn of the Big Wheel is just a gorgeous little rhythm behind a very simple tune, but it owes all of its magic to Horace Andy's vocal. Man, I love the way he sings this. All love, released; free. In truth, re-tagging it as a favourite is probably a bit of a push. There are to my mind four stand out songs on this disc: Safe From Harm, Be Thankful... Unfinished Sympathy and this. It's less than half of the album, but these tunes are timelessly good and elevate an enjoyable if somewhat surpassed effort to something that few discs can really claim to match: genre definition.

Blue for the Most - Abraham

Track list:

1. Magpie
2. Stay Here
3. What Gives With You
4. City For Us
5. Start The Song Backwards
6. Blue For The Most
7. For All The Times
8. Heather
9. Freedom's When
10. On A Plane
11. Ever So Slowly

Running time: 39 minutes
Released: 2002

So there was a point I bought up a lot of downtempo electronica. I think I was inspired by how much I loved Bonobo's Animal Magic (that may well end up the most linked post in the blog) and just made purchases of fancy in that general direction. I am pretty sure that is how I happened upon Abraham. I recall really liking this album - particularly the title track and the opener, Magpie. However I don't think that I have once thought of it or played it in the last couple of years (Last FM confirms no scrobbles since 2013). I really don't expect it to stand up, thinking instead that I will see it for the faddish purchase it was, but we'll see.

The early strains sound dated. The vocal is still pretty but - and I'm going to run into this again when I unearth my Zero 7 albums, I'm sure - it just feels... old, tired. Early noughties chill, no place in the modern world. Yet I have need of open lazy time more than ever of late. Despite really appreciating the target goal of the track, I am just not seeing how it engenders it. It's a little too empty, and that was one of the songs I remembered fondly.

Stay Here is familiar once the lyric gets moving and suffers from the same problem. There is sod all of any interest going on in the composition. Boring rhythm that is just a little too persistent, lack of any melody worth the name. The voice doesn't hold the same lustre as it did on Magpie either. It has some kind of dirty effect applied, making it breathier, grubbier; duller. The next track is worse - it adds more variation in the arrangement but that is achieved by cheesy synth sounds that make my toes curl. I don't know if I am just in the wrong mindset for this or whether I somehow blinded myself to tracks full of faults in search of a sound that others did better. What really astounds me sitting here in 2015 is that I bought another Abraham record after this one. The one thing I will say in its favour - the songs are shortish and so it won't keep me too long. Somewhere along the line they might just manage a decent blend of interesting patterns to go with the singing which is, at least, consistently pleasant. Its problem is that pleasant is certainly not enough - not any more.

I wrote the intro, that describes this as faddish, a few days ago. I have only just re-read the sentence. Sometimes one has a sense for these things. In fairness, I think the particular style of music that this espouses is a really hard one to do with any kind of longevity. This would have only worked because there were a hundred and one different groups churning out "chillout" music with ethereal vocals and plenty of space to relax into; it was everywhere, you couldn't escape it and frankly it was a darn site less annoying than Nu-Metal.

Hmm - the title track just started. Here the organ line lends it a freshness, supporting the singer a little more. There is still a lot of blandness in the rest of the piece but it is a very noticeable jump in interest. I was all set to be sceptical of it given how little Magpie still appealed, but this? Its alright. Not stellar, but it actually has enough to it to work and hit the target it was shooting for. You have three or four things happening throughout the track which helps stop any of them from becoming too dominant or repetitive and it allows her voice to soar and engage. My listen seems to be blighted by odd jumps - a bad rip, perhaps? - but that is a big step up from boredom. The next track even threatens to pick up the baton and keep the level at an acceptable level for a while, but then just fails to build on a start that had enough in terms of rhythm and synth strings to build false promise. It quickly settles into a rhythm which is disappointing. It is still miles more interesting than the first 5 tracks though.

I have had a strange few days, to the point I am finding that I need every second I can to try to de-clutter my mind. I am just constantly mentally switched on at the moment and it means that I am not finding time for active participation in fun. Weirdly I find this sort of stream-of-consciousness effort conducive to that mental decompression. I switch off the parts of my brain that are chewing over things and just let surface thoughts run wild. That's probably why the opening is quite so negative. I don't like ragging on things really - I would far rather say something is not for me than that it is bad, and be on far more safe ground if I did. That said, I don't think the "one in a crowd of many" spirit of the comments is particularly unfair or unkind. Abraham certainly were not the most celebrated of the downtempo clones that appeared with the new millenium, they are also probably far from the worst. They just happen to be the lacklustre one that I have the misfortune to be spending my Thursday evening with!

The digression of the previous paragraph signifies a return to the flatness I felt listening to the first half of the disc. There just isn't quite enough happening here to switch on and tune my ears in to, and neither is it having a soothing, relaxing effect. There is something a little... awkward about some of the rhythms employed, exacerbated by the odd skip or jump in the playback which has persisted past the one song, which prevents me from finding the pieces as placating as I am sure they were intended to be. I am into the last couple now, and the vocal performance on On a Plane is more daring, stretching and soaring like the subject of the title (I have not picked out the lyrics enough to say whether it fits the subject of the song). Alas whilst that is interesting and a welcome stretching of the safety the other tracks have been mired in, it is paired with a particularly dull backing and so on balance the tune is no more appealing to me than any of the rest. A shame really.

I think this vocalist could have been wonderful with a more inspired tune to back her up, but alas what she seems to hve been working with is distinctly middle of the road, uninspired, even phoned-in arrangement. There are warbles and tinkles on the final track that remind me of some of the sounds used on Premieres Symptomes by Air... but where there they are (from memory) used as part of a sonic construction to build interest, here they are left isolated. The difference in impact is therefore immense and ultimately I find my prediction confirmed. Only the title track really stood out; only the title track survives the swing of the axe.