Apart from a brief Britpop blip when I bought a couple of Oasis and Blur CDs I spent most of the mid- to late 1990s listening to Trip Hop or its mutant offspring Downtempo, Chill-Out, and Electronica. It was the soundtrack when I was dating my wife, and on our honeymoon in New York I bought a copy of Felt Mountain which I heard for the first time in our hotel room so it definitely defined an era for me. Though some of it was derided as trendy background music for designer boutique shopping and middle-class dinner parties, I thought it was the best thing to come out of Bristol since Cary Grant.
I had to pick myself up off the floor when I realized that it’s been over 20 years (20!) since Massive Attack released Blue Lines which, along with Portishead’s Dummy a few years later, pretty much defined Trip Hop and opened the gates to a flood of bands mixing up stoned beats with moody electronics, crackly samples, and cinematic strings. But my favourite Trip Hop album was by another mob from Bristol, the gloriously woozy Come From Heaven by Alpha. I have no idea how well known the album is (probably not much) but it’s felt like my precious secret love since it came out in 1997.
Alpha sloooowed their beats and samples down to a crawl to make hypnotic, somnabulent music that sounded so dosed up on cough mixture it didn’t have the energy to get out of bed — there’s even a track on it called “Nyquil” which I assume is meant to be a joke. With the two lead singers’ emotionally-bruised fragility it drifts along in the most beautiful, foggy haze, like comedown music for the mother of all hangovers (or drug highs, whatever turns you on.) Not that I have those sort of nights anymore, but this first track especially still sets me adrift on memory bliss.
Download: Somewhere Not Here – Alpha (mp3)
Download: Rain – Alpha (mp3)
Buy: Come From Heaven (album)