or better or worse, we here at Stylus, in all of our autocratic consumer-crit greed, are slaves to timeliness. A record over six months old is often discarded, deemed too old for publication, a relic in the internet age. That's why each week at Stylus, one writer takes a look at an album with the benefit of time. Whether it has been unjustly ignored, unfairly lauded, or misunderstood in some fundamental way, we aim with On Second Thought to provide a fresh look at albums that need it.

Back in 1994, Tricky and Portishead were lumped into the same musical category – trip hop. The fact that they were both from Bristol, England and dealt in some of the same lush spookiness makes this understandable. The word on the street back then was that Tricky "invented" trip-hop, that his was the sound that everyone was copying. He was indignant about the claim. "What I do isn't trip-hop," he would say. He's changed his tune somewhat since then – he gets a little irked nowadays if he's not given credit for inventing the movement that he so recently didn't invent.

But to even associate Tricky with the genre begs a very sticky question. What is, or was, trip-hop, anyway? The first Portishead album sounds exactly like what we've come to know as trip-hop and is an acceptable answer to the question of what trip-hop is all by itself. But Maxinquaye? Is this trip-hop? Seriously? The man on the street, the one who knows Dummy inside out, might not even recognize this album, and even if he did, he almost certainly wouldn't call it "trip-hop." It's too dark. It's too dense. It's not pretty, and only rarely is it fun. By no means is it party music, or some new James Bond soundtrack. So what is it?

It's this: a brilliance so strange, dark, sexy and soulful that Tricky himself has not been able to duplicate it. It's a document of obsession, and mistrust, and misconduct, and solipsism, and sociopathy. It's a dense arrangement of borrowed sounds – thick honey beats, crunching guitars, Isaac Hayes, Marvin Gaye, and whatever else he found lying around, including a lot of his own old Massive Attack lyrics. But far from being a collage artist, Tricky takes each of these elements and makes them his own, bends them to his will, so that the finished songs sound like no one else. In all those respects, he's a lot more like Prince than Portishead.

Tricky trades in darkness, to be sure, and there's an underlying sense of futility and stoned resignation running through the record. He trades in death sometimes, too – there are a lot of guns and imagined killings on Maxinquaye, and Tricky sounds scarily convincing when he gets violent. ("Bullet to the head, what you know I's joking?" he challenges on "Brand New You're Retro"). But, like Prince, he hits full stride when he talks about sex. In fact, he almost seems not to be able to help himself. The sexual overtones on Maxinquaye are thick and constant. Wherever there's a blunt being sparked, or whenever Tricky admits that he "could just kill a man" ("Suffocated Love"), some slant-wise or straight-ahead intimation of fucking falls hard behind it.

Not that the sex is all fun and games – far from it. Think of the bizarre grind of Prince's "Darling Nikki," and the unsettling fade out with back-masked vocals and strange dripping water sounds, and you begin to get an idea of what Tricky has going on here. Or, even better, consider this lyric from Prince's "Strange Relationship": "Baby I just can't stand to see you happy / More than I hate to see you sad." That song has a la-la sing-along melody, and a funky groove, and you might not even stop to think about how fucked-up that statement is. Tricky thinks about it. He thinks about it way too much, one could easily argue. He describes "Strange Relationships" in words and melodies befitting their nature – strange, sharp, hard – and wraps them in an arresting and breathtaking landscape of sound. Listening to a Tricky song can often feel like being violated by him, in a delirious, druggy haze. He's forthcoming with his intentions: "When we fuck we'll hear beats." But the fucking has to end sometime, and the thoughts Tricky is left with are some of the record's most fascinating observations.

The first line says a mouthful: "You sure you want to be with me? / I've nothing to give." There's both an honesty and a duplicity in that lyric that can't be faked. Here I am, he says, and if you think this is a good idea, well, okay. But I must warn you that I'm not much. I'm hollow. I'm tortured, mostly self-tortured, and self-centered, and often childish, and I'm okay with that, but I don't expect you to be. It's a cover-your-ass line that cads have been using since time immemorial – don't get close to me, I'll hurt you.

Meanwhile, the music is a perfect, utterly irresistible seduction. The bass softly goes thump, at a medium pace. The synth sample looped over and over in the background is weird and hypnotic, the kind of sound a snake charmer would make, if women were snakes. And the voice – oh! Martina. Such painful soul. She was Tricky's 19-year-old girlfriend at the time, and for her to sing his lyrics – and for those lyrics to be "You sure you want to be with me," almost a warning to herself – is either a testament to the trust the two had, or to the manipulation inherent in the relationship, or to her own personal bravery, or all three. Her voice continues on, with Tricky's twisted words in her pretty little mouth: "Won't lie and say this love is best." Well, at least he's not lying, for whatever small comfort that's worth.

"Suffocated Love" cuts even closer to the heart of the matter, if only because Tricky uses his own voice here, instead of making Martina do the heavy lifting for him. The music is a porno in slow motion, all funk and bass and strangely inappropriate (yet perfect) vibes, with a repeated sample of a slowed down sex moan, like an animal on the soundtrack. And then the description of a relationship begins, warts and all:

it's too good
it's too nice
she makes me finish too quick
is it love?
no, not love
she turns my sexual tricks
she says she's mine, i know she lies
first i scream, then i cry.

She says she's his, but he's convinced, perhaps against given evidence, that she's a whore. Maybe that sounds a little harsh, but who else "turns sexual tricks"?

Despite being off-handedly dissed like this, Martina's response is even more revealing.

i think ahead of you, i think instead of you
will you spend your life with me
and stifle me?
i know why the caged bird sings, i know why...

She seems to have come to the understanding that this is a big, dumb ego she's dealing with, and she wants him anyway. It's touching how seamlessly the two are given equal time to voice their opinion on this doomed relationship. Well... I say that, but for all I know, they're still the best of friends. Which only proves the point Tricky makes later in the song when he warns, "You ask what is this? / Mind your business!"

It's as if Tricky wants to rewrite the rules of the sexual relationship to suit his intimacy issues (evidenced amply in lines like, "She keeps me warm but we never kiss"). It's tempting to read the whole of Maxinquaye in terms of "issues" – add this fear of closeness together with the widely publicized fact that Tricky's mother died when he was four, and that the album is named after her (her name was Maxine Quay), and you have yourself a juicy Freudian reading of the record. And it does work on that level – Tricky even taunts us with that angle directly. In the middle of the astonishing slow groove "Aftermath," he throws in a sample from the first scene of Blade Runner, the words, simply, "Let me tell you about my mother."

But Freud can't explain everything (he never could). When Tricky sets his sights on outside forces, his filter adds even more color than it does to his sexual explorations. "Ponderosa" is one of the greatest songs about drugs ever written. Consider this snatch of pure poetry, delivered by Martina:

The mighty crowd
Search for their spaces
And turn around, time's gone
Take ten paces
Been up ahead
Can't make head of tail of it
I drink 'till I'm drunk
And I smoke 'till I'm senseless

It's not only his own head Tricky is mired in. It's the ugly world as well. "They lead us outside / Take us out quietly to the cage / Through the bars you see scars / Results of my my rage." He's trapped and angry. And his solution to this rage? "I drown myself in sorrow / Until I wake up tomorrow." Not the sexiest use of alcohol and marijuana ever invented, but hey, whatever gets you through the night. At one point, during a bass break, we hear Tricky inhale, exhale, and then let out a remarkable sound, an indescribable cross between an "ooh" and an "ugh." His scratchy, throaty voice delivering this sound tells the whole tale. It's an "ugh" of resignation, of world-weariness, of disdain, and only the most reluctant and joyless sort of elation. It's the sound of unhappy, "medicinal" drug use. And as the beat and samples scramble and run off in ten directions at once, one is left with not only a lyrical impression of disconnectedness, but a sonic representation of it as well.

There's plenty of room for pure sonics on Maxinquaye, even amidst all of Tricky's ideas and propensity towards confession. "Black Steel" is nothing but sound – it's a "cover" of Public Enemy's "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos," but the lyrics are severely truncated here, and endlessly repeated, and by the song's end, it's not about the lyrics at all anymore. It's only about Martina's voice. This version of "Black Steel" is a showcase for big guitar sounds, and an almost hilariously self-conscious industrial beat – it sounds like a hammer hitting metal, quite literally. And yet, there's a feeling of virtuosity in it. It disconnects itself so totally from its very serious source material that it never for a second feels false.

And besides, Tricky has his own serious material to offer, albeit in his own skewed way. He takes an insider's view of his depressed Bristol neighborhood: "Hell is round the corner where I shelter," he says. But he doesn't stop at just calling it hell. He "takes you down the corridors of [his] life." They are long and twisting indeed.

We're hungry, beware of our appetite.
Distant drums bring the news of a kill tonight.
The kill which I share with my passengers.
We take our fill, take our fill, take our fill

This, remember, is happening round the corner. There's a killing going on here, a primal feast, underlined by the weird moaning in the background. One imagines animals ruling a dirty industrial wasteland after dark every night. One equally imagines the Donner party.

But as the last lyric is repeated, "take our fill" sounds more and more like "take a feel." There's always a "feel" to be taken with Tricky – the beautiful string sample that the entire track rides over is the same one Portishead used to underline Beth Gibbons' confession that she just wants to be a woman. Even during this trip through his corridors, he can't help being just a little bit sexy.

That doesn't make it trip-hop, though. There's too much here to be sequestered to any genre, let alone that one. And perhaps that's what Tricky meant all along – "Don't pigeonhole me, my shit is too deep." And indeed it is. Calling Tricky "trip-hop" is a bit like calling Prince "pop." It's partially accurate, but the music is so much better than that.