With this song Massive Attacked proved themselves to be lightyears ahead of the competition in dance music. Unfinished Sympathy literally came out of nowhere, it was a marriage of a wonderfully unique musical arrangement, a distant cousin of hip-hop, coupled with a much mellower ear, hence the best name anyone could come up with was Trip-hop. Bristol in the 90s proved to be an incredibly fertile breeding ground for the trip-hop genre, also spawning Portishead and Tricky, but this wasnt dance music per se, rather a glorious head music that you could dance to. Unfinished sympathy was very much a gentler, feminine spin on the intensity hip-hop and disco with the emphasis on mellow, lighter beats that left plenty of room for Shara Nelsons astonishing Motown inspired voice and words, showing such poignant and tender lyrics as The curiousness of your potential kiss has set my mind and body aching You really hurt me baby, really hurt me, how can you have a day without a night? And their use of strings was pioneering for the era, this wasnt a case of lets throw an orchestra on here, the subtlety they brought to the arrangement would be aped by everyone from Destinys Child to any leading guitar band you could care to think of. Unfinished sympathy wouldnt be Massive Attacks last foray into using female guest vocalists, they would go on to recruit the wonders that were Liz Fraser for Teardrop and Tracey Thorn for Protection to create supremely assured and realised pop classics of the coming decades, but in Shara Nelson they found their very own Aretha, pitching her vocals over a song of the deepest modern blues to create their own masterpiece in the process.