Tricky - Maxinquaye

Named for his mother, who died when he was four, Maxinquaye arrived in February 1995 and made Tricky the most unsettling figure to come out of Bristol. He had been the third voice on Massive Attack records; here he built a world of his own, mostly out of murk.

The central decision was handing the majority of the lead vocals to Martina Topley-Bird, then eighteen, and burying his own whispered delivery underneath hers. The effect is of two people singing the same song from different rooms. "Overcome" reworks Massive Attack's "Karmacoma" into something narcotic. "Black Steel" turns Public Enemy's furious "Black Steel In The Hour Of Chaos" into grunge-rock fronted by Topley-Bird, which should not work and is the best thing on the record. "Hell Is Round The Corner" shares an Isaac Hayes sample with Portishead's "Glory Box" and gets somewhere much darker with it.

Trip hop as a genre label was invented largely to file this album, and Tricky has resented it ever since. Fair enough — nothing else filed under it sounds like this.

180 gram single LP reissue from Island and UMe.