Their debut was a surprising delight. I’ve since read that they may have disowned it but I really enjoyed it so I find that a little weird. (It’s been long enough that I don’t remember well enough if it was just too long or if it was too ambitious or too silly. Regardless, despite its …
Tag: Trip Hop
Aaliyah (2001)
This is like a British LP from the ’60s where it was released around the same time as a hit single but, in order to encourage you to buy the single instead of the LP (which you presumably buy anyway?) the single is left off. (Not the American version of selling you the single twice …
Blue Lines (1991) by Massive Attack
Is this the first ever trip hop album? My limited research suggests that yes, it absolutely is. There may have been some “Bristol sound” singles that presaged this record but nobody seems to have produced an LP. So, whatever you think of this album, and whatever you think of the term “trip hop,” there’s this …
Gorillaz (2001)
I just read a brief review I wrote of Demon Days that I don’t even recognize, not just because I have no memory of that album but because the person who wrote it has changed so much in the interim. I wrote it 10 years ago almost to the day and it’s safe to say …
Viva! La Woman (1996) by Cibo Matto
I’m a subtitles guy, I’ll take subtitles over dubbing every single time. (Well, not quite: I’ll watch dubs for laughs.) Similarly, with music, I have strong opinions about listening to people sing in their own language versus singing in English when they don’t have complete command of that. This view appears to be a minority …
Selmasongs (2000) by Bjork
I have not seen the film though it has been on my list for years. I suspect that the time for me to like the film is long past – if there ever was a time – but that doesn’t really apply to the soundtrack.
Felt Mountain (2000) by Goldfrapp
The British really did like a certain sound circa the turn of the millennium. It was one I was entirely oblivious to, living in rural Quebec, even though I had what was then an incredible internet connection. I suspect some of my radio station friends were into stuff like this, but I was honestly unaware.
Things to Make and Do (2000) by Moloko
I don’t know Moloko at all, so I don’t know how this album changed their sound from previous record. I read that they were considerably more electronic before this record, but I’m taking that on faith. All I can really talk about what’s here, whish might be described as soulful, funky, dancier Portishead – like …
Maxinquaye (1995) by Tricky
I first heard the “Black Steel” cover so many years ago, by accident, on a CD I won in a magazine contest. (You can get some idea of the vintage of that by that description, I think.) It was my first experience of Tricky and I’m pretty sure I thought he was a band because, …
The Beta Band (1999)
Sometimes you encounter something you don’t know at all and it just stuns you with something special about itself. In this case, it’s the irreverence and the extremely healthy disrespect for genres (which I’m a sucker for) of something like the lead-off track, “The Beta Band Rap”, which I just can’t get over. It takes …
Implode (1999) by Front Line Assembly
I just finished listening to KMFDM’s Adios, another band that operates on the spectrum between industrial music and electronica. (Though apparently these guys have existed longer, which is funny because I had never heard of them but had heard plenty about KMFDM.) As is often the case when I listen to two vaguely similar records …
Is This Desire? (1998) by PJ Harvey
If you spend too much time reading music magazines – do people still do that? – or you spend too much time on the internet, it’s tempting to see Is This Desire? as the flip side of The Boatman’s Call, or a direct response to it or some combination of the two. The easiest thing …
Psyence Fiction (1998) by UNKLE
I know next to nothing about ’90s electronica or the individual scenes at the time. So it is a shock to me at how this weird, all star album exists. Because this is some kind of line-up of guest vocalists for a group that, as far as I can figure out, had released a single …
Angels with Dirty Faces (1998) by Tricky
Note: For reasons I can only guess at, the version of this record I streamed on Google Play was missing the first two tracks but I didn’t notice until my final listen. Oops! (Maybe this is the google equivalent of when you were ripping a CD and the ripping program didn’t communicate with your disc …
From the Choirgirl Hotel (1998) by Tori Amos
I have only ever previously heard one Tori Amos album, her debut. So when I first listened to this there was just a little bit of shock that it didn’t sound like my expectations.
Mezzanine (1998) by Massive Attack
Massive Attack is more towards the Hip Hop side of Trip Hop and for me that’s a bit of an issue since Hip Hop has never been my thing and the whole appeal of Trip Hop for me is the lack of rapping.
Ray of Light (1998) by Madonna
This may or may not be the first Madonna album I’ve ever listened to – not 100% sure – but it is definitely the first one I’ve given my three requisite listens to. Given that fact, it should be no surprise that I can’t fully grasp what a drastic left-turn this record probably was for …
The Velvet Rope (1997) by Janet Jackson
I had a very, very fixed idea of Janet Jackson before listening to that record. It was an idea essentially created by music videos (Janet Jackson is attractive) and the odd accidental radio exposure, but also created by the music industrial complex, which has generally marketed female performers in a particular way for quite a …
Portishead (1997)
If we force an artificial divide onto the trip hop spectrum, I am very much on the zany, insane, unpredictable Bjork side of it, rather than the moodier, “darker” but more uniform side that Portishead finds itself in.
Homogenic (1997) by Bjork
It’s been a while since I sat down and listened to all the Bjork records I own at once time so you should really take what I say with a grain of salt because, maybe if I had done that recently, I wouldn’t be so damn blown away by this record. But, without having listened …
Glee (1997) by Bran Van 3000
I love genre-bending. A number of my most favourite bands are bands that can play a wide variety of genres well, and make these genres sound like their own – or, alternatively, convince you they are an entirely different band. So I should like this. I should like this even though it is based in …