Tricky

Tricky's debut is arguably his best album and definitely a classic. The eccentric trip-hopper lets his dark mood and paranoia loose for the first time on this disc, to wonderful effect. His muse and collaborator Martina tempers his brooding with slinky, confident vocals. Maxinquaye skulks around in the shadows, just waiting for its mysteries to be discovered.

Twenty-seven-year-old English rapper, writer and producer Adrian Thaws has been
known as Tricky since he roughed up bits of Massive Attack's milestone 1991 LP Blue Lines.
On his debut, Maxinquaye, he introduces an abrasive mix of animated beauty and
technological skank. Working with the perfectly empathetic teen-age singer Martine,
Tricky devours everything – from American hip-hop and soul to reggae and the... More >

From Soul II Soul to Massive Attack to Tricky is a straight line leading straight down to a bad place you should take a chance and visit. Depressive, constricted, phantasmagoric, industrial, yet warmly beatwise and swathed in a gauzy glow that promises untold creature comforts, these are the audioramas of someone who's signed on to work for the wages of sin and lived to cash the check. Determinedly Lo-NRG, he's a sad sack with attitude, a complicated malcontent whose cynicism can't quash his capacity for euphoria or rebellion. And though he long ago saw through the willed optimism of black-Brit dance music, he's here to tell you that a dystopia with Martine singing in it has some serious rewards. (Grade - A+)