Track Listing

1. Overcome
2. Ponderosa
3. Black Steel
4. Hell Is Around The Corner
5. Pumpkin
6. Aftermath
7. Abbaon Fat Tracks
8. Brand New You're Retro
9. Suffocated Love
10. You Don't
11. Strugglin'
12. Feed Me

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #12356 in Music
• Released on: 2003-08-25
• Number of discs: 1
• Format: Explicit Lyrics
• Dimensions: .23 pounds
• Running time: 57 minutes

CD Description
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 yearslater 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, dealingexclusively in paranoia and obsession. The striking rhythmsof 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.

Customer Reviews

Soundtrack to the English disaster
The thing that really sets this album apart from anything else produced in the last 10 years (including Tricky's other albums) is the lyrics. Like reading Shakespeare or listening to the ramblings of a drunk it takes a while to make sense of the words and realise just how much wisdom there is lying beneath:
"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!

Dark stuff that makes for good bedtime listening
I really like this album. I'd first heard Tricky on the Massive Attack/ Protection CD and from hearing that, felt it was worth taking a chance on his solo album - what a lucky guess.. Seriously, if you want something dark and metallic, kind of fresh out of the furnace sounding, balanced with well thought-out lyrics and haunting vocals this will work for you. It has (for me anyways) a good balance of emotional tones in the different pieces, without resorting to repetition, although this does crop up in a very interesting way for those who already own Massive Attack's Protection album. The two albums, side by side, seem like two interpretations of a singlular theme; the cut-and-pasting of voices and lyrics between the two albums opens another perspective from which to appreciate tricky's work on this album. End result: on it's own feet 'tis a memorable album, side by side with Massive Attack's Protection it offers a deeper and intriguing statement. But then you might just like it for the beats..

A classic album that should have been a major influence.
I remember getting this album on the day it was released and being absolutely bowled over by it's inventiveness and originality. Sadly at a time when Hip-Hop has descended into a macho-fest of guns and bling it still stands out as a sign of where hip-hop could have gone. It should heve paved the way for lots of people to experiment and put their own sound together but somehow it and Tricky seems to have just stayed as a one off in that world and it's worse off as a result. Maxinquaye appears to have influenced very people with the exception of Indian rapper Mukul whose excellent Stray album seems to have taken that ball and run with it and arguably less succesfully Anticon's acts like Why? Nosdam etc.

Where did it go wrong? it should have been a shining new dawn. Nevertheless it still more than deserves to be regarded as a classic album and is essential listening for anybody with the slightest of interests in music.