A Forest Mighty Black – Mellowdramatic

I often think of trip-hop as being a quintessentially British phenomenon: an inflection point in nineties British electronic music that signaled the mainstreaming of atmosphere as a key component of the music in that country’s electronic canon. Consequently, all my favourite trip-hop albums are British: Portishead’s Dummy, Tricky’s Maxinquaye (featuring heavily, it needs to be said, Martina Topley-Bird), and Massive Attack’s Mezzanine. I’ve sampled very few non-British trip-hop albums, and fewer still have stood out. One that comes to mind is Madreblu’s Necessità, whose standout track, Certamente, features prominently in the Sopranos episode Commendation[1].

However, I’ve spent the better part of the last month listening to the best album of nineties trip-hop I’ve heard from mainland Europe: Mellowdramatic by Germany’s A Forest Mighty Black. Like so many of the albums I feature here, its pitch is simple: it does something easy masterfully. Boom-bap inspired beats serve as a backdrop to light electric piano noodling and slow-moving basslines that engulf the album’s tracks, providing them with the atmosphere with which trip-hop has come to be associated. The result is the sound of a night spent reclining in a lazyboy distilled into a fifty-minute sonic journey. Where I described the feel of Portishead’s Dummy as being reminiscent of ‘a night spent on the couch of someone unfamiliar as a sit-down party goes on around you in blurry slow-motion’, Mellowdramatic feels like a night spent in the comfort of one’s own home as the last night of the week inches towards midnight: a night away from the madness of it all.

[1] Unfortunately, the rest of the album is as consistent in sound as it is inconsistent in quality