Unappreciated Gems 9 – THC: Adagio

The 90’s trip hop scene was a fairly short-lived blip on the popular music radar. As is the way of these things, there were a couple of big names (Portishead and Massive Attack in this case) and a lot of also-rans who enjoyed some brief success for a couple of songs before fading back into the ether.

Portishead and Massive Attack are pretty much the only bands that still command industry coverage and pull reasonable sales and large gig attendances, but that’s not to say trip hop’s dead; it’s just sleeping a little. Artists such as Hungry Lucy, Costanza and Lost Balance still mine the genre and are producing some great downtempo at the moment and are well worth checking out.

As always happens when a style of music enjoys some popularity only to fade back into obscurity, there’s a lot of good music that goes unappreciated and one of the tragedies of the trip hop/ downtempo scenes has been American band THC and their ‘Adagio’ album.

THC’s sound was dark and dreamy, yet sexually charged and they seemed destined for success after a couple of their songs were featured in season four of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, providing the music for fictional band Shy, but it never seemed to happen. Shortly after Adagio’s release in 1999, the band broke up; main instrumentalist George Sarah left the band and vocalist/ songwriter Sarah Folkman seemed to disappear from the music scene completely.

These days, unless you’re inclined to download it from iTunes, ‘Adagio’ is quite hard to come by, but it’s well worth seeking out, especially if you’re a fan of trip hop, downtempo or just good, relaxed music; it swirls, it drones, it’s sombre in all the right places and Sarah Folkman’s voice is difficult to beat in the genre and ultimately, music like this being condemned to the also rans of a once popular genre is a tragedy.

Here’s ‘Need to Destroy’, which was one of the songs featured in ‘Buffy’.