Is it the bass crawl at the start, or the icy keyboards descending down from above, or the breakbeat kicking in on the chorus, or Shara Nelson's vocal, or the clavinet break, or the husked rap, or is it all and more? I can't pin down what makes "Safe From Harm" such a brilliant way to start such a brilliant album. I remember hearing the hype and going ahead and picking up the disc used back there in the summer of 1991, and things all of a sudden looked a little different. Soul II Soul had already given an initial taste of something going down in Bristol a couple of years before, but this was something all the more compelling, song by song.
Call it what Bobby Gillespie was hoping for from Screamadelica, and which he nearly got to in his own way. But this was the real collective effort, with no apparent centerpiece, just song after song emerging from somewhere. Shara Nelson on the one hand, Horace Andy on the other, and for many a person (myself included), this was the first they had ever heard Andy's reedy voice, and what a voice it is, hearing it keen in the middle of "One Love," surrounded by the abbreviated horn blasts and the gentle lope and scratch, not to mention the piano sample at the end. Not to mention all the Massive guys doing their perfectly zoned and stoned raps, whispered, creepy, deep. Tricky steps to the mike with a fascinating restraint (as opposed to not-thereness, if you will) not present on most of his solo stuff; listen to him sneak and snake around the title track with Mushroom and 3D and the like, the finger-snapping beat almost too weirdly calm.
Theoretically, America could have and should have produced this record. I don't think it has, yet. Hip-hop can and does eat the world, recombine its DNA, yet where would this have fit in? Massive's big breakthrough here wasn't so much inventing trip-hop, if you want to call it that (I don't, because it's its own trip) but verifying the future of underplaying, emphasizing the nonexistent explosions by means of silence, an anti-Bomb Squad/Chuck D approach, as well as embracing the dub, the soul and all importantly the chill. RZA has gotten close to this over time, but he never seems to relax with it properly.
"Unfinished Sympathy" is of course the one everyone remembers, and it is utterly undeniable in its beautiful flow, as much the start of strings in Britpop but from a totally different angle, not emphasizing the song's importance but providing a perfect counterpoint to the cascading beats and Nelson's vocals. But perhaps the one I ended up liking the best was the concluding song, "Hymn of the Big Wheel," with its buried guitar/whalesong start, burbling then shining keyboards, spartan beats and Andy invoking a tried-and-true metaphor in a soaring benediction and prayer of hope amid the terrible mire. What a song. What an album.