by Ed Biggs August has been a terrific month for music: not least because of the headline-grabbing return of Frank Ocean with not one, but two new albums in the shape of visual project Endless, following two days later on August 20th by Blonde, currently sitting atop the charts on both sides of the Atlantic and many markets around the world.
by Ed Biggs 25 years after its release, it’s difficult to conceive of how different British urban music might sound if it wasn’t for Massive Attack. The Bristol trip-hop collective’s debut album Blue Lines did an enormous amount to broaden the horizons for the fledgling British urban music scene. Chief producer Andy ‘Mushroom’ Vowles adopted the sampling and production culture of American hip-hop and filtered it through the aesthetics of the
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by Ed Biggs Emerging from the hotbed that was the Bristol scene nearly a quarter of a century ago, Massive Attack were responsible for at least two of the greatest British albums of the ‘90s, maybe even three depending on how favourably you view Protection. 1991’s sublime Blue Lines, celebrating its 25th anniversary later this year, belongs among the all-time greats, filtering jazz, dub, reggae and rap into quintessentially British mixture