Mezzanine

Massive Attack - Teardrop
EAC+LOG+CUE | FLAC: 143 MB | Full Artwork | 5% Recovery Info
Label/Cat#: Virgin # 7243 8 94981 2 7 | Country/Year: Europe 1998
Genre: Electronic | Style: Downtempo, Dub, Trip Hop

Massive Attack had wanted to work with Cocteau Twins' vocalist Elizabeth Fraser since the early '90s, and, after years of wrong-time, wrong-place scenarios, they finally had their chance on 1998's Mezzanine. Although Fraser co-wrote three of the album's 11 tracks and had a far more interesting impact on "Group Four," it was the sweetness of "Teardrop" that allowed the song the most commercial success. The single, released in May 1998, gave Massive Attack their first-ever Top Ten hit in the U.K. and gave Cocteau Twins' fans a chance to nearly clearly hear Frazer's lyrics…

Bob Holroyd's pluralistic approach to music takes the listener to many corners of the world as well as to the sensitive interior regions of being. Hollow Man is an album that dwells in the ambient elsewhere somewhere between the classic trip-hop of Mezzanine by Massive Attack and the cerebral pop of Music For Films by Brian Eno. The dramatic arrangements and shifting intensity of the more cutting pieces provide an expected aggressive stance - which is periodically softened by brief smooth areas of sincere ambient-inspired contemplation…

Bring It On is the debut album by English band Gomez. Gomez entered the recording studios in late 1997 to turn their demos into an album. During this time they also toured the UK with Embrace. The first single, "78 Stone Wobble" was released in March 1998 with the album following a month later. Bring It On was well received on both sides of the Atlantic with Spin calling it a "damn beautiful album" and Allmusic's Greg Prato comparing "78 Stone Wobble" to Nirvana's unplugged version of Meat Puppets' "Plateau". The album experienced a further boost in popularity when it won the 1998 Mercury Music Prize for best album, beating the favourites Massive Attack's Mezzanine and The Verve's Urban Hymns. "Get Myself Arrested" and "Whippin' Piccadilly" were later released as singles. While Gomez toured the US as the support artist for Eagle Eye Cherry, Bring It On is the only Gomez album so far not to make the US charts although the album did make the Australian album charts. "Bring It On" is also the name of a song on Gomez's following album, Liquid Skin.

Cab Calloway, who first became popular in 1930, retained his popularity (despite a lot of competition) throughout the swing era. On this excellent CD (the fifth of 12 in the European label Classics' Complete Calloway series), highlights include "Keep That Hi-De-Hi in Your Soul," "Nagasaki," "Copper Colored Gal," "Frisco Flo" and a crazy "That Man Is Here Again." With fine soloists in trumpeters Lammar Wright and Shad Collins, trombonist Claude Jones and (by 1936) the great tenor Ben Webster (along with a top-notch rhythm section that includes bassist Milt Hinton), this was a much better swing orchestra than it is generally rated in jazz history books.