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Jan 28, 2016Twenty one years since his Mercury Prize nominated debut solo album Maxinquaye emerged, Tricky may have finally delivered one that can stand proudly equal alongside it.
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Feb 16, 2016Skilled Mechanics is an intelligent, pertinent piece of work that shows just how fresh the ideas of Thaws remain.
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Jan 27, 2016The whole thing comes off as an imaginary Tricky radio station where the DJ plays his own stuff and mixes himself into other artist's tracks, so if alternate views and unclassifiable collections are desired, Skilled Mechanics isn't a lark or a side project but a necessity.
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Jan 27, 2016In your [Tricky's] other albums, the landscape would scuttle and drift, and you’d blink in and out as you willed; here the room remains a room, and yet you remain... well, I still don’t know what you are now. But that’s for the good. I like you better when I can’t define you.
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Q MagazineFeb 4, 2016The most successful tracks are those where Tricky is front and centre. [Mar 2016, p.117]
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UncutJan 29, 2016The seething mood is familiar but the cursory electro beats offer little of the grimy richness of primetime Tricky. [Mar 2016, p.81]
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Jan 27, 2016Despite these mis-hits, Skilled Mechanics seethes with low-level, lo-fi menace, its spare instrumentation creating an unsettling queasiness that will have been familiar to Tricky’s admirers since 1995’s Maxinquaye.
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Feb 24, 2016Those few powerful moments [on Boy] are the exception rather than the norm. Their rawness is an essential element that could have lent Skilled Mechanics the sort of organic, internalized anxiety that once defined Tricky.
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Feb 1, 2016While it isn’t without its moments, that is not enough to forgive the sub-standard R’&’B and lumpy rock crossovers.