Sold Date: February 10, 2024
Start Date: January 6, 2024
Final Price: £20.99 (GBP)
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Tricky made a low-key entrance onto the music scene as a guest vocalist on Massive Attack's 1991 classic 'Blue Lines'. There was little indication that he would resurface four years later with an album as powerfully unsettling as 'Maxinquaye'. Accompanied by the sweet-voiced Martine, Tricky takes the listener on a tour of the dark corridors of his mind, dealing exclusively in paranoia and obsession. The striking rhythms of stand-out tracks 'Overcome', 'Hell Is Round the Corner' and 'Suffocated Love' merge seamlessly with a hard-rock reworking of Public Enemy's 'Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos' and the warped soul of 'Abbaon Fat Tracks' to create one of the '90s' most compellingly atmospheric records.

Around the time Tricky emerged as a solo artist, independent of the Massive Attack collective, he was asked to describe his music. 'If you want to dance to it, go ahead. If you want to sit in a darkened room and let it fill your head with strange thoughts, that's fine too'. 'Trip Hop', a term Tricky soon grew to despise, has become so omnipresent over the years, that it's easy to forget how outside the mainstream it once was. Tricky's 1995 debut 'Maxinquaye' is one of those albums that brought the music to the forefront, entering the UK charts at #2 on its release despite a shocking lack of airplay, and ending up topping many, many year-end lists. But despite its being a harbinger of one of the most prevalent music styles of the nineties, it exists outside of trends and time and still stands as a powerhouse of musical innovation almost twenty years on. Vocalists Martina Topley-Bird and Goldfrapp work as modern day female Pied Pipers, luring you into Tricky's dark, menacing, haunting and overall disturbing world: a ghostly Hades painted in vivid imagery by Tricky's lisping and lilting flow on top of tantalizing beats. An essential album for any collection.