As part of Amazon’s monthly $5 MP3 Album Deals, Massive Attack‘s 1991 debut album Blue Lines is currently on sale for only $5. You can check out a track listing here below.

Blue Lines is widely considered to be the first trip-hop album. At the time of its release electronic music was associated with upbeat dance tracks, but Massive Attack sought to evolve their own sound by fusing down-tempo hip hop, soul, reggae, and other musical and lyrical influences important to the group’s history. What resulted from their painstaking efforts became a hallmark for British electronic music production and gave rise to “chill out” electronica.

Massive Attack’s dreamy, sample-heavy sound has been used to great effect on the soundtracks for countless films including Michael Mann’s The Insider (a remix of Blue Lines‘ opening track “Safe from Harm”) and Guy Ritchie’s chaotic goofball gangster flick Snatch. The lyrics are pure swooning poetry and the beats are propulsive and hypnotic. Blue Lines also contains one of the group’s most popular tunes, “Unfinished Sympathy”; the song was covered by Tina Turner on her 1996 album Wildest Dreams and was played during the final lap of all of the long distance races during the 2012 Summer Olympics in London. “Safe from Harm” extensively sampled Billy Cobham’s jazz-funk epic “Stratus” to the extent that he is credited as a co-writer on Massive Attack’s version. Other tracks on the album feature samples from music by Tom Scott and the Mahavishnu Orchestra.

Most of Blue Lines was recorded in the home of famed Swedish fusion artist Neneh Cherry. The recording was done over a period of several months in her baby’s room. It was later revealed that the reason the room always stank was because a dirty diaper had been accidentally left behind a radiator. Blue Lines was ranked number 395 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. As influential to an entire generation of hip-hop, rap, and electronic musicians as the jazz, funk, and dance artists of past decades were to Massive Attack, their debut album is a masterwork of eclectic musical styles and a terrific disc to spin when you just want to kick back with a stiff drink and daydream of serene oceans and crystal blue skies.

You can also purchase Blue Lines on CD for $6.57 and get a free MP3 copy downloaded to your Amazon Cloud Player.

Track Listing

1. Safe From Harm
2. One Love
3. Blue Lines
4. Be Thankful For What You’ve Got
5. Five Man Army
6. Unfinished Sympathy
7. Daydreaming
8. Lately
9. Hymn Of The Big Wheel

Note: when you purchase MP3s through Amazon, it stores your purchases to Amazon’s Cloud Drive; from there you can stream the music right from their online player. Also, if you have a Kindle Fire, your MP3 purchases will automatically be available for you to stream on your device. All your purchases are backed up and available for you to download at any time. You can download the files to your computer to load to an MP3 device and to your iTunes account if you have one. If you’d like to gift these MP3 purchases, you can – just click the “Give album or song as gift” button on the right on the product page. From there you enter the recipient’s email address and then select either specific songs to gift or the entire album.