Twenty-seven-year-old English rapper, writer and producer Adrian Thaws has been known as Tricky since he roughed up bits of Massive Attack's milestone 1991 LP Blue Lines. On his debut, Maxinquaye, he introduces an abrasive mix of animated beauty and technological skank. Working with the perfectly empathetic teen-age singer Martine, Tricky devours everything – from American hip-hop and soul to reggae and the more melancholic strains of '80s British rock like the Cure and PIL – to assemble a mercurial style of dance music that immediately finds its own fast feet. He's a scavenger with the formal acuity of a scientist.

Tricky achieves a kind of mongrel orchestration unimaginable before the arrival of hip-hop. Prince and a thousand studio hounds before him may have mapped out innovative and useful techniques, but hip-hop's ambitiously cobbled-together friction sets the stage for this brand of sensation scoring. In the ironic hands of Tricky and Martine, thrilling pieces like "Overcome," "Aftermath" and the brilliant "Suffocated Love" cast around and find lulling tunes and soulful moods amid depressing themes and frank, fast-moving snatches of noise and melodic disruptions. Never sacrificing flow, no matter how grungy, Tricky's kitchen-sink sound welcomes punk guitar momentum, static, distortion and metallic auras, plus oddly voiced piano and woodwind accents.

All of this results in murky, deep music that's a natural outgrowth of the way Tricky and Martine see the world. Their curbed rage surfaces on a cover of Public Enemy's "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos," their breathy aggression heats "Brand New, You're Retro," and their sexy narration drives on "Abbaon Fat Track." Trip-hop is the current label being given this music, but it's no more than a cute, reasonably accurate headline. At any given time, certain pop records – more than books or movies or whatever – strike a chord that exists for a moment as the sound of the beyond cool. Right now, Tricky's Maxinquaye is it. (RS 710)

JAMES HUNTER