
Tricky Vs The Gravediggaz
4TH & BROADWAY 1995
A-side: ‘The Hell E.P.’
Apex of scary UK/US crossover.
Tricky’s collaboration with the Gravediggaz was never going to be for the faint of heart. The unconventional Bristol rapper’s team-up with the horrorcore supergroup founded by Wu-Tang Clan producer RZA came hot on the heels of his debut Maxinquaye, a critically garlanded hit that brought its creator unwanted celebrity, the publicly shy and uncomfortable Tricky damning his own debut as “coffee-table” and dissing the wider trip-hop movement it birthed. If ‘The Hell E.P.’ was first part of a campaign to move his music into the leftfield (a process fully realised on 1996’s Pre-Millennium Tension), ‘Psychosis’ was its sprawling, hard-to-fathom peak. Over a hazy loop impregnated with ghostly words, husky hums and half-heard murmurs, Tricky’s racked gasped whisper ponders whether he is “the devil’s son/Outta breath and on the run”. The laughing raps of minister’s offspring Grym Reaper supply an even creepier rejoinder, his apocalyptic sing-song oratory about a rain-less landscape that is “petrified, terrified, horrified” delivered with snickering disregard. The cloying static of RZA’s production underlines both his genius and his sustained ability to unnerve – in 1995 everything he touches turns gold – on an ambulance-chasing B-side that’s hard to unhear.