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Named after the artist's late mother, Maxinquaye is a (quite deliberately) suffocating delight of oily beats and murky atmospherics, bruised lyricism and crafty samples. Tricky relishes his frontman role, that much is clear from a venomous turn on Brand New You're Retro (which lifts from Michael Jackson's Bad) and the man's captivating performance on Hell Is Round the Corner, which rides the same Isaac Hayes sample as Portishead's Glory Box (which was released as a single just weeks before Maxinquaye hit shelves). But he's not quite flying solo here, as his then-girlfriend Martina Topley-Bird steals the spotlight on a series of numbers. And it's the collision of these vocal styles - one croaky and smoky, one silky smooth but able to bear teeth when called upon - that drives this album to the classic status it today enjoys.
And rightly so, too. Trip hop had reached its creative zenith in the mid-90s, and it was Portishead's Dummy and this collection that gave the sub-genre its twin pillars of demonstrable brilliance. (The next contender would not appear until 1998, in the shape of Massive Attack's awesomely claustrophobic Mezzanine.) But while Dummy was an unlikely hit with the coffee table set, Maxinquaye's oppressive production and oblique lyrics ensured it bypassed cocktail party playlists. It was - it is - intoxicatingly deep, with too many moments of malevolence-meets-melancholy magic to summarise in just a handful of paragraphs. And if that sounds like a cop-out, it partially is: returning to this album is like meeting an ex-lover you last saw a lifetime ago. You want to hold onto the memories, not scatter them amongst the detritus of the present day. Because these songs are possessed by a wicked beauty rarely glimpsed since, in the work of Tricky or any other artist; a beauty intrinsically tied to time and place.
Maxinquaye was both Melody Maker's and NME's album of the year in 1995. It was nominated for the Mercury Prize in the same year (losing out to Dummy). Magazines Q, Rolling Stone, Spin and Village Voice scored it incredibly highly. It has a five-star rating at AllMusic.com. So while it's far from the easiest of listens, even so long after its release, this set is as essential to any record collection as Pet Sounds, Purple Rain and Paul's Boutique. Believe the critical consensus, as in this instance it's entirely accurate.
--Mike Diver
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Customer Reviews
Tricky live was (and still is) an experience (top notch musicians, energetic versions with real drumming of all the "Maxinquaye" tracks). Any live version would have been welcome, especially the one of "feed me" for example which gives another dimension to the track. again a missed opportunity....... stay away.
"You feed me lies, distortion - the English disaster"
"I was raised in this place, now concrete is my religion"
"We're hungry, beware of our appetite"
I could try writing paragraph after paragraph about the different meanings I take from these lyrics and why I think they show us how ugly and scary an institution modern British culture can be, but I could never get the point across the way Tricky does. You know when you hear a tune and it's so good that you're convinced you've heard it before? Well that's how I feel about the words on this album - they sound like they were just waiting for someone to say them.
It's not just the lyrics either - the music creates the paranoid mood the lyrics evoke and the lyrics describe the dark lonely places the music takes you to, making it almost impossible to seperate the two. The beats are disjointed and messy - but never just for the sake of it. The chopped up ideas and phrases and the layering of different vocal parts on every song takes you to the twisted place the narrator is living in.
8 years down the line and this album still sounds ahead of the game - phrases like trip-hop and chilled-out are deceptive (even insulting), save them for baby food music like morcheeba. I rank this album up there with all the classics - astral weeks, the stone roses, dylan, marley. I just hope time proves me right!
To step out of Massive Attacks shadow and deliver this album was astonishing.
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