|
|
|
| 'To rock a rhyme that's right on time, it's TRICKY." That's what RUN DMC said. 'We'd better print those Readers' Poll forms in the next issue, because, if anyone makes a scarier, sexier fin-de-siecle headf*** soundtrack this year, we're not even sure if we want to hear it.' That's what David Bennun says | |
| TRICKY
MAXINQUAYE Fourth&Broadway BRCD61 012 tks/58 mins/FP FOR a start, you've never heard anything like this. Not remotely. lt could have arrived fully formed from Venus for all the resemblance it bears to anything we're used to. In case you haven't heard - and, if you haven't, we assume you just disembarked from the same spaceship-Tricky is the former Massive Attack collaboratorwho, leftto his own devices, will contaminate us all with sounds that are less music, more a disease of the senses. "Maxinquaye" owns me. It creeps through my body like a sexual cancer. And it's not only me. Everybody I've played it to succumbs to the infection. We're all sick with beauty. "Maxinquaye" is a deeply, frighteningly erotic record. Deeply, because it rubs itself up against all five senses and one or two extra. Frighteningly, for the cloying, overripe nature of its erotidsm. Sex as threat. Sex as asphyxiation. Sex as death, death as a thing alive. The corpse billows and pulses with maggots. Evidence? How about "Suffocated love"? Opening the windows to let in a breath of sweet, opiated fumes and drive out all that smothering dean air (In a previous life, this was hip hop, but Thcky is to hip hop what acid house was to skiffle. With typical and inspired perversion, he covers Public Enemy's "Black Steel" as jittery drone rock with a disquieting and incongruous female vocal). "Suffocated love" is a grey green greasy Limpopo, seeping across terrain. The imprints of Iipsticked lies are slathered across the surface. It's a pessimistic take on pillow talk: believe award and you're dead. Fail to and you might as well be. There is truly a fin-de-siecle quality to "Maxinquaye". Forgive me for being so obvious, this being the fin-de-siecle and all, but it is an album of succulent decadence. "Overcome", the opening track, is oblique, multi-dimensional and merciless, an embalmed moment. A pair of nearly lovers walk through quiet suburbs, their thoughts taken up with each other. At the same instant, war planes scour the landscape of Kuwai twith fire. No message. No moral. No connection. |
Just a simultaneous
image. Attempting to meld the state of nations with a state of mind is
such a howlingly ambitious conceit that it takes a minute or two to realise
that this is a cover of Tricky's own "Karmacoma", sung with endlessly malleable
blankness byTricky accomplice Martina. "Hell Is Round The Corner" Iifts
the same Isaac Hayes sample that set Portishead's "Glory Box" a-quiver
and bends it into sinister shape with a promise of self-inflicted damnation.The
song gives every sense of that dreamlike state wherein you tread - knowing,
unstoppable and doomed - into your personal abyss.
Tricky's music is so gripping, original, sublime, his lyrics so abstruse and woven into the sound, that they become inseparable. Often, he hides in the mix, whispering or murmuring behind Martina, slipping implike across the beats. "Aftermath" is so empty, it's hardly there at all. Tricky has claimed that "Aftermath" was an attempt to see through the eyes of the dead. It sounds it. Clattering and smudged, with broken paving slabs where its heart should be, "Ponderosa" tries to rub a thumb across the sharp and painful lines of consciousness ("Id driknk tiI I'm drunk and Is moke til I'm senseless"). Most debauched of all is "Abbaon Fat Tracks", which contrives to be petulant, vidous and sensual all at once. The teasing litany of proffered pleasures becomes a series a cruel threats, aIthough it's hard to tell exactly where. This is far darker, far more S&M, than any number of the leather-bound gruntings and wheezings masquerading as pop's take on the less vanilla aspects of sex, and of life in general. Tricky makes music without a centre because he wishes to reflect a world without a centre. In the end, it reflects nothing but the listener's mind. It is sickly, claustrophobic, erogenous, aphrodisiac, infatuated, engorged, weary, hollow, lacerated; all but perfect. "Maxinquaye" is so breathtakingly good that the odds dictate anyone who makes a better record this year wiIl f*** with your ideas what pop music is and what it could be just as surely as it has f***es with mine. Fail to hear it and you may as well beam straight back to Pluto. You'll like it there. There's no atmosphere and you'll be among your own kind. |