Back at the time, Bristol's trip-hop first team were all the rage, and this album was a firm favourite. I suspect I might have been drawn to it after hearing the Tracey Thorn songs, but I'm not sure where. I haven't listened to it for some time, so revisiting it will be an interesting exercise. Will it have aged well? Did I play it to death, until I was bored of it? Let's see.
Opening track Protection, is a lovely Tracey Thorn song, where the Massive Attack treatment doesn't sound too radical, and certainly not too far away from what Everything But The Girl might have done with it. It's a fantastic start, and quite a departure from Massive Attack's previous album. Karmacoma featuring rapper Tricky, is very different, and laid back, more intense than I remembered, while Nicolette's Three sounds quite ordinary. I absolutely love Weather Storm, a simple piano melody, with a cool jazz bass, although it puzzles me that it seems to have taken none co-writers to come up with it. After that, Spying Glass, sounds average, Horace Andy turning out a perfectly serviceable dub-style reggae track.
Better Things, another Tracey Thorn song, is another fantastic track, the sparse arrangement, including a James Brown sample, fitting Thorn's song perfectly.
Eurochild gives Tricky another outing, but other than some nice guitar sample, there's not much to this, and despite having listened to this album hundreds of times in the 1990s, I genuinely don't remember Nicolette's Sly, such is its dullness. Heat Miser is an anodyne instrumental, and the album ends with a live version of the Doors' Light My Fire, which adds nothing to the original, doesn't feel particularly inventive, and feels completely out of place - as if they ran out of ideas with the album half finished.
We've had this dilemma before - the problem of judging an album at thirty years' distance, where what sounded new and interesting then seems quite ordinary now. The quality of the songs now makes more impression than the sampling and arrangement, and this album is very much up and down in this respect.
3* - despite a couple of highs, this hasn't really aged well.
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