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Maxinquaye | 
| Artist: Tricky
Label: Universal / Island
Category: Music
List Price: £8.99
Buy New: £7.98
You Save: £1.01 (11%)
New (39) Used (10) Collectible (1) from £2.99
Rating:  18 reviews
Sales Rank: 5550
Format: Explicit Lyrics
Media: Audio CD
Running Time: 57
Discs: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 5.6 x 5 x 0.5
MPN: 524089
UPC: 731452408921
EAN: 0731452408921
ASIN: B000001E7V
Release Date: August 25, 2003
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
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| Tracks:
| • | Overcome | | • | Ponderosa | | • | Black Steel | | • | Hell Is Around The Corner | | • | Pumpkin | | • | Aftermath | | • | Abbaon Fat Tracks | | • | Brand New You're Retro | | • | Suffocated Love | | • | You Don't | | • | Strugglin' | | • | Feed Me |
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| Editorial Reviews:
Adrian Thaws (aka Tricky), one of the key components of Massive Attack around the time of their important Blue Lines album, seemed to find more space to explore his fears, loves and neuroses as a solo artist on this, his debut release, which is also something of a classic itself. Whilst the Massive Attack sound is a standard one of dub basses, Tricky gains greater contrast with his smoky vocals by utilising a disjointed, handmade mix of sounds, from hard noise ("Black Steel") to marimba-like plonks ("Ponderosa") and slow-beat joints ("Brand New You're Retro"). Here, alongside vocalist and one-time partner Martina Topley Bird, Tricky is able to maintain a sense of perspective lost in later works--the recording sounds positive and instructive, as if they were happy just to make a good album. Named after his mother, Maxin, who committed suicide when Thaws was six, there is just the right level of paranoia in the claustrophobia of his rhymes, creating a musical document that sounds homespun and satisfying. --Charlie Porter
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| Customer Reviews: Read 13 more reviews...
 My favourite, and first, album by Tricky May 11, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Yeah, this is good. I don't think there's a weak track on this album. As always, Tricky sounds almost asleep when he's actually part of the track - often you get other folk singing... with a bit of Tricky whispering in the background... or growling... or sounding like he's challenging the world record for speaking while holding gravel in his mouth. Smart stuff.
Is it deep? I dunno... I like it is all I'm saying... there might be a 'message' or two in the tracks - hell, it might be full of 'messages', but I just really like 'em. It chills me out to listen to this, all the songs sound pretty unrushed, like there's all the time in the world - except maybe for Black Steel and Brand New You're Retro of course.
Lyrically this album is clever and it rhymes a lot... nothing wrong with that, I like it. Best tracks are Ponderosa, Hell Is Round The Corner and Suffocated Love.
Maxinquaye March 18, 2007
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
Every generation has music that defines their era and in the mid-nineties it was the output of Massive Attack, Tricky and Portishead that has the greatest resonance. Like watching 'This Life' these albums transport you to a specific time and place: pre-millenium, pre-9-11, pre-Blair... Although they coincided with the media-hyped emergence of Britpop and Radiohead's The Bends, it is the sound of the Bristol 'Holy Trinity' that is most redolent of that period. Twelve years on (I can't believe it!) I bought the CD having only owned the cassette (really) and not having listened to it of late. Whereas Portishead in particular had to contend with a plethora of interior imitators, Tricky's sound was harder to replicate, even superficially: the weed-induced paranoia, the sexual ambiguity and provocation, the muttered half-raps, the male-female vocals less in duet but rather hybrid forms of Tricky's own perverse identity. It has not (quite) lost any of its power, and still has to be considered one of the great albums of the period, even if a few tracks have dated a little.
'Overcome', the opener, I feel has suffered the worst. The lyrics recycled from Tricky's raps on Protection are sung blandly by his original muse Martina Topley-Bird, and the pan-pipes in the chorus seem so cliched now. It's garden variety trip hop and was surprising used as the closing track on Island's Tricky retrospective, A Ruff Guide (not the only discrepancy on that play list). 'Ponderosa' is still fantastic, even if the production sounds a little flat now, with a loop that sounds like Tom Waits playing on a skull drum kit in Haiti. Topley-Bird reminds us of how unique her voice sounded then (pre-Mike Skinner, pre-Lilly Allen), its Grange Hill sneer over Tricky's marajuana-psychosis lyrics: "underneath the Weeping Willow lies a weeping wino". 'Black Steel', for all its grungy cross-over appeal, remains a brilliant reworking of the Public Enemy original and one of the last great examples in the dying art of the cover version. The stoned and jaded (and recylced) lyrics on 'Hell is Round the Corner' complement the Isaac Hayes sample as effectively as Portishead's similar 'Glory Box', and feels strangely like the album's centrepiece. Oddly grandiose, but at the same time obscure, it was an odd choice for a single at the time but still stirs up some unusual feelings.
Superficially 'Pumpkin' is vapid trip hop in the mold of Overcome and a waste of Alison Goldfrapp's obvious talents, but it is given levity by the Smashing Pumpkins sample and Tricky's own near-comatose contributions. Its low-key finish - like wind-chimes rotating in slow motion to a beautifully blunted hip hop break - is a great end to the old cassette Side One. 'Aftermath', always the album's most overrated track and first single, started sounding dated by the time trip hop was in full swing, its low slung funk and 'jazz flute' too reminiscent of numerous other hideous 'chill out' acts. I can imagine this is what Tricky was subsequently trying to distance himself from on Pre-Milennial Tension. 'Abbaon Fat Tracks' is still startlingly provocative and erotic, not least for having Topley-Bird sing about anal sex and the general stickiness of the production: all warped soul and sitar exotica. Both sensual and pornographic, it reeks of sex and intimacy, as does the dissection of Tricky and Martina's relationship on 'Suffocated Love': "I keep her warm but we never kiss ... she cuts my slender wrist'. It is partly these tracks that make Maxinquaye so superior to its goatee-stroking bandwagon contemporaries, the use of soul and hip hop as an window into a private world. It makes the listener strangely complicit by forcing us into a queasily voyeuristic position; more simply, its a great sex album.
'You Don't' is still a wonderfully singular piece of soul that is suggestive of early Massive Attack and is without comparison on the album, while 'Strugglin' is a massive indulgence and a sign-post to Tricky's subsequent self-destructive inability to harness his talents into something listenable. The beautiful closer 'Feed Me' ends Side Two on a similar somnabulant note to the first side, slow-motion soul for the end of the 20th century to file next to Unfinished Sympathy. In conclusion then, its still brilliant, and not to be confused with much of the posturing Hoxton wine-bar background music being mass-produced at the time. One of the last truely original great albums.
Still moves me February 10, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I bought this album in March 95, and it still holds. Keep coming back to it, every now and then. Just have to hear "Overcome" or "Pumpkin" in another context, and I think: yes, that was a good album, and I put it on... and it's just as great an experience now as it was the first time I heard it. You cannot overrate it! It's as integrated an album as the Beatles' Abbey Road or Sgt. Pepper; and if that doesn't mean anything to you, well that's your problem!
Every tune leads into the other, they are magnificent by themselves and outstanding as part of a whole. One hell of a modern symphony, if you like!
A classic album that should have been a major influence. October 6, 2006
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
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.
 Just Buy Massive Attack Instead October 5, 2006
3 out of 19 found this review helpful
I cant say i was completely surprised by the overall rating of 4 + half stars awarded to this album, it being considered 'a classic' and all. However i feel it worthwhile to point out that the chap who gave it 1 star is probably more on the money. This album is completely over-rated, like a really, really sub standard massive attack. At some points he even wholesale re-cycles loads of massive attack (as well as portishead - lazy git!) lyrics, which would be somewhat forgiveable if they were presented in a clever alternate musical context - but they aren't. The songs (and sounds) are really contrived. Sure, there's the darkness and paranoia you expect but here it just sounds dirgy + boring. It's that mid-ninties Bristol sound by numbers. Actually, the cover of Public Enemy's 'Black steel in the hour of chaos' provides the only highlight and i have to say it rocks. Wicked reinterpretation, try and download it something, 'cos its really not worth buying the whole album for.
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