I stumbled across a CDR from 2008 with several band names written across the top; Tricky was one of them. I didn't know which album of his it was, so I put it in the car stereo during a night drive somewhere. It was the remastered version of his debut and his immediate zenith, Maxinquaye.
A simple sidenote to the album is that it birthed the career of Alison Goldfrapp, that's how epic and genre-shaping this album was, and is. Nearly 20 years later (next year will hit that anniversary), it still sounds fresh.
Even though Portishead's Dummy had come out in the fall of '94, Maxinquaye was the quintessential 'trip-hop' album for me. Born from the collective of Massive Attack, Tricky mined darker territory - biographically, lyrically and sonically.
The gem in Tricky's crown was his teenage compatriot Martina Topley-Bird, a smokey-voiced chanteuse who sounds shockingly older than her age and stuck with Tricky (creatively and romantically) for four albums.
From Maxinquaye:
From Nearly God (a Tricky album in all but artist name):
From Pre-Millennial Tension:
From Angels with Dirty Faces:
By the dawn of the new millennium, Tricky had lost the plot a bit. A series of weak albums carried him through most of the decade. In 2008, after a five-year gap of not releasing music, he came back with the decent Knowle West Boy and has completed a trio of albums that may not be as groundbreaking as his early work but restore the quality of his output.
His '90s work is hard to match, even for a modern day Tricky himself.
