The Best Trip-Hop Albums of the '90s
Trip-hop was a London magazine's word for a sound Bristol never wanted, so rank these albums. Nothing got in on a genre tag; the rules are stricter than the bands. Studio albums, 1990-1999. The rhythm bed has to be a sampled or programmed breakbeat, not a kick on every beat, over a foregrounded bass: sub weight, dub treatment, or a line at or above the drums. A credited voice leads, sung or rapped, on most tracks. That one removes the most: DJ Krush, Nightmares on Wax and the instrumental wing go. Two per artist, maximum. Each printed year is the year of first release; a Spotify date never decides it. The link goes to the oldest edition Spotify carries of that record, chosen by edition and never by the date the page prints. Where the linked page shows a different year, the item says so. Four mastheads set the bands: Slant's twenty, FACT's fifty, Far Out's and Treble's tens. Three or more, upper band; everything else, lower. Every entry states its count. Inside a band, the order is yours.
Tricky — Maxinquaye (1995) is #1 on “The Best Trip-Hop Albums of the '90s”.
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Tricky — Maxinquaye (1995)
Named on all four source lists. Tricky titled the record after his mother, Maxine Quaye, then handed most of the singing to Martina Topley-Bird and muttered along a half step behind her. Black Steel rebuilds a Public Enemy rap into a rock song with a woman delivering the lyric, and the tempo never lifts across the twelve tracks.
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Massive Attack — Mezzanine (1998)
Three of the four have it; FACT is the holdout. Elizabeth Fraser of the Cocteau Twins sings Teardrop, Horace Andy takes two more, and the guitars sit high enough in the mix that the group fell out over it. Eleven tracks, after which Mushroom left.
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Portishead — Dummy (1994)
Every one of the four carries it. Beth Gibbons sings all eleven tracks. Glory Box is built on Isaac Hayes' Ike's Rap II and Sour Times on a Lalo Schifrin cue written for Mission: Impossible. Geoff Barrow, in the Guardian in 2008, on the label the record got stuck with: "The whole trip-hop tag was nonsense. It was developed by people in London, and the people in Bristol just had to put up with it."
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Massive Attack — Blue Lines (1991)
Slant, FACT and Far Out list it and Treble does not, so three. Shara Nelson sings Unfinished Sympathy over Wil Malone's string arrangement and leads two more; 3D, Daddy G, Mushroom, Tricky and Horace Andy take the rest of the nine. Two Spotify ids carry those nine tracks under the same 1991 date, so the bare title is what separates them. During the Gulf War the credit was shortened to Massive.
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UNKLE — Psyence Fiction (1998)
All four lists have it, and they agree on very little else. James Lavelle ran Mo' Wax; DJ Shadow did the building. Thom Yorke sings Rabbit In Your Headlights, Richard Ashcroft takes Lonely Soul, and Kool G Rap and Mike D rap over drums pitched somewhere between hip-hop and a film score. Thirteen tracks, closing on Be There.
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Portishead — Portishead (1997)
Slant and Far Out both name it, so two of four. The band cut their own playing to acetate, roughed the discs up and sampled the results, which is why a 1997 record sounds like damaged library music. All Mine puts a brass arrangement behind Beth Gibbons at her most theatrical. Eleven tracks, and harder going than the debut.
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Smoke City — Flying Away (1997)
Two lists carry it, Slant and Far Out. Nina Miranda sings in Portuguese and English, and a Levi's advert put Underwater Love onto British television. Bossa nova and samba sit underneath the breaks rather than draped over them, across ten tracks that never once raise their voice.
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Tricky — Pre-Millennium Tension (1996)
None of the four picked this one up. Cut in Jamaica and New York the year after Maxinquaye, it is drier and meaner, and Martina Topley-Bird delivers Christiansands like a threat. Spotify spells the title without its hyphen. Eleven tracks and no relief anywhere in them, which was the idea.
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Sneaker Pimps — Becoming X (1996)
Slant is the only one of the four to list it. Kelli Dayton sings; Liam Howe and Chris Corner wrote and programmed. 6 Underground lifts John Barry's Golden Girl out of Goldfinger, and Post Modern Sleaze is where the bass does the work. Spotify holds three separate ids for these eleven tracks, none of them labelled.
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Lamb — Lamb (1996)
One list out of four, Slant's. Lou Rhodes sings over Andy Barlow's programming; Trans Fatty Acid runs at drum and bass tempo while Cottonwool barely moves at all. They were a Manchester duo, not a Bristol one, and Fontana put the record out in 1996. Spotify files the ten tracks as a compilation, though the running order is the 1996 album's.
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Morcheeba — Big Calm (1998)
Treble includes it and the other three do not, so one. Skye Edwards sings, Ross Godfrey plays slide guitar and Paul Godfrey handles the samples, which gives eleven tracks a warmth this music mostly refuses itself. Part of the Process is the one that got played to death, and it earned that.
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Mono — Formica Blues (1997)
Slant has it and nobody else does, so one of four. Siobhan de Maré sings, Martin Virgo programmes, and Life In Mono turned up in Alfonso Cuarón's Great Expectations a year later. Two Spotify ids both read Formica Blues; this one has the ten tracks of the August 1997 British release.
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Hooverphonic — A New Stereophonic Sound Spectacular (1996)
Only Slant carries it, one of the four. Hooverphonic are Belgian, which puts them off the Bristol map entirely, and 2 Wicky builds on Isaac Hayes' Walk On By under Liesje Sadonius' voice. Columbia issued the eleven tracks on 29 July 1996; the page linked here dates the same record 1997.
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Cibo Matto — Viva! La Woman (1996)
No source list names it, zero of four. Miho Hatori and Yuka Honda made a New York record on which the song titles run Apple, Beef Jerky, White Pepper Ice Cream and Know Your Chicken, and the beats land exactly where the Bristol ones do. Michel Gondry shot Sugar Water as one take running forwards and backwards at once.
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Neneh Cherry — Homebrew (1992)
Zero of the four lists. Cameron McVey produced the bulk of it, with Geoff Barrow among the credits two years before Dummy, which makes these ten tracks a rough draft of what came after. Michael Stipe sings on Trout. Buddy X outlived the record itself, mostly through other people's remixes.
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Esthero — Breath From Another (1998)
Not one of the four has it. Esthero is Jenny-Bea Englishman, working in Toronto with Doc McKinney, who would go on to help build the Weeknd's first mixtapes. Heaven Sent is where the record settles. Eleven tracks out on Work in 1998, proof the sound had a Canadian wing nobody in Britain was counting.
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