Bristol’s innovative and influential Massive Attack opened their second album with the title track, a luminous eight-minute street soul lament graced by a wistful vocal from Every Thing But The Girl’s Tracy Thorn floating above a soft bed of warm synth pads, all held down by a sample from, paradoxically, one of James Brown’s toughest beats. And that tension between the soft and the hard repeats throughout the album, as the band pair a familiar warmth with a sense of bittersweet yearning, matching abstract, gaseous synth/sample backing tracks with big vocal statements from Horace Andy and Thorn, and blending soothing strings with deep bass. Low tempo but high temperature, detached but cautiously open, Protection is nocturnal music, lit by streetlights and strobes rather than sunlight.

– Harold Heath

It may sound strange to say that Protection is Massive Attack’s ‘forgotten’ album from the 1990s, in between the captivating debut moods of Blue Lines and the dark, extreme tension of Mezzanine. But perhaps it’s more undeservedly underrated, with one of Tracey Thorn’s two guest appearances, the title track, being an all time classic of devotion. Sonically the album as a whole feels a touch crisper – not necessarily brighter – than Blue Lines, but no less elegantly bass-and-beat driven, a sonic blueprint for what would be stereotyped as trip-hop soon enough.

– Ned Raggett