Tricky: A Ruff Guide

By RUSSELL BAILLIE

(Herald rating: * * * )

Dropped by his label after a many a verbal run-in and a series of increasingly perplexing albums following the great 1995 debut Maxinquaye, the maddest man in English hip-hop gets the post-divorce best-of treatment.


It's 17 tracks from the slightly friendlier end of Tricky's spectrum. Which means its murky grooves lean heavily on his many vocal collaborations, many of which display his creative gifts for creative sampling, or — as his still thrilling cover of Public Enemy's Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos shows — musical mutation.


That track, one of many that feature the racked singing voice of ex-lover Martina Topley-Bird, is the noisiest thing on offer. The rest rumbles, grumbles and mumbles past, still managing to sound just as hip-hop-but-not-as-we-know-it as it did first time around. But thankfully it doesn't get as bogged down as it did on later albums like Angels with Dirty Faces. On the likes of the gospel-shaped P. J. Harvey duet Broken Homes, Topley-Bird's Overcome or his Commodores-sampling theme Tricky Kid, it shows that while he used that old line between madness and genius as a skipping rope, he at least delivered some truly inspired music.

Label: Island