★★★★★
Whatever you remember about Blue Lines, it probably isn't that the fidelity was crap. It might even be that it was excellent: smoky, English, yet tinged with dub, soul, sexiness and a sense of space that set Massive Attack's 1991 debut album apart from practically everything else. So a remix seems a trifle odd, even if it's carried out by the band themselves in their beloved Bristol hometown...
- recordcollectormag.com
2013-04-02
★★★★★
Seasons 4-8 of The Simpsons aside, it's hard to think of much from the '90s that has aged well: Britpop, Saved by the Bell, shell suits, and Liverpool Football Club have ignominiously slid from pop culture icons into figures of fun since the turn of the millennium; even the laugh track on Seinfeld sounds dated now...
- www.undertheradarmag.com
2012-12-21
★★★★★
We weren't listening to Blue Lines in 1991. Whoever swears they were ahead of the curve and booming Blue Lines at its original summer release is either a veteran of the Bristol underground or an opportunistic liar. In August of '91 we still hadn't heard the first rumbles of the Wild Bunch, nor could we place the names 3D or Daddy G or Tricky Kid or Shara Nelson. We were listening to Seal. We were listening to Deee-Lite. We were listening to Pato Banton...
- www.pastemagazine.com
2012-12-11
★★★★★
It's the kind of thing hot new artists tend to say in interviews, but the Wild Bunch were telling the truth. They really were originators, on the verge of making two epochal albums: in 1989, Nellee Hooper produced Soul II Soul's Club Classics Vol. One; two years later five others piloted Massive Attack's debut, Blue Lines, which, if anything, was even more influential...
- www.guardian.co.uk
2012-12-06
★★★★★
Listening to Massive Attack's debut album, Blue Lines, 21 years after its initial release is like reading an old William Gibson novel that describes the then-near future, which is now the present, with unsettling precision. Nearly every song offers a sound currently in use in music's taste-making leading edge...
- pitchfork.com
2013-04-01
★★★★★
It is an undisputed cultural milestone. In 2003, Q magazine named it the tenth best British album ever. Among British albums of its era, only The Stone Roses' self-titled debut has been more lauded. Yet, taken out of context 21 years after its release in June, 1991, how does Massive Attack's Blue Lines hold up as music...
- www.popmatters.com
2012-11-29
★★★★★
The trip itself matters far more than the destination. The same can be said for trip-hop, whether it's the trance-inducing trip portion or the hop heightened by hips shaking. Take equal moving parts of downtempo electronica, jam-soaked dub, the gossamer pluckings of club sounds, and the slickest of hip-hop lyrics and splice that with ghostly nostalgia and an equally ghostly group of transients. There. You've concocted a semblance of trip-hop in its basic form: Massive Attack ...
- consequenceofsound.net
2012-11-29
★★★★★
Back in 1991, when Massive Attack's debut album, Blue Lines, was released, there wasn't a whole lot of music that sounded like it. It was the year Nirvana broke through to the mainstream and hip-hop started crawling out of the old school and into a new era. But even with those cultural milestones, no one was prepared for the at-times discomforting sonic landscapes found on the British trio's first record...
- www.avclub.com
2012-11-20
★★★★★
Sound: Massive Attack traveled a long way to get here. After the last under produced but still underrated album, Protection, it seemed as though they were on their last legs. But then came this masterpiece. It is easy to hear that there is less influence from Andy Vowles on this album, who wanted a more jazzy/hip hop album. Robert Del Naja and Grant Marshall wanted to use more live instruments, and this is what they created, a paranoid, tense atmosphere masterpiece...
- www.ultimate-guitar.com
2012-04-12