Tricky’s lascivious solo debut, Maxinquaye, stands alongside Massive Attack’s Blue Lines and Portishead’s Dummy as one of the most influential Trip-Hop albums of the ‘90s. Maxinquaye takes the glistening electronic soul of Blue Lines and smothers it in far-grittier textures, exploring the destructive nature of love (“Now I could just kill a man,” he says on “Suffocated Love”) and sin (the devious “Abbaon Fat Tracks”). Tricky’s vocals play back and forth with those of singer Martine, whose hypnotic, slippery phrasing opens the album on the sexy “Overcome.” Samples abound, of course, from Smashing Pumpkins (on the appropriately-titled “Pumpkin,” a moody track featuring Alison Goldfrapp) and Issac Hayes (“Hell Is Around the Corner”) to snippets from films like Blade Runner and The Rapture. If there was ever any doubt about the sonic lineage between hip-hop and trip-hop, “Aftermath” and “Brand New You’re Retro” blur the lines to the point of undeniable extraction. These are beats Timbaland and Dre have only dreamt of.
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