out, Class-A substance damaged lo-fi affair which still manages to force melody through dark mesh. Realistically though, this isn’t a dyspeptic, career destroying Metal Machine Music themed 'fuck you'. Because while the songs forms are barely scratched in, never mind being fleshed out; Tricky makes the sound of dark nights, of want and solitude just as engaging as anything on his debut." Critical reception Nearly God received positive reviews from critics. James Hunter of Rolling Stone found the music gripping, "recalling the early intimacy of Laurie Anderson, the raw aggression of Public Image Ltd. and the spaced oddities of Scott Walker". Spin magazine's Terri Sutton was impressed by Tricky's production and the record's "obsession with debilitating stasis", comparing it favourably to Sly & the Family Stone's 1971 album There's a Riot Goin' On: "Nearly God is most indebted to Riot for the idea that an attention to details, a precise awareness, can capture from entropy's numbing flow small gifts of nuance and emotional resonance." Roger Morton from NME was less enthusiastic: "The loopy loops and dysfunctional mantras of Tricky's smoked-out backing tracks are less structured and more spartan than on Maxinquaye. Sometimes it sound like he's just kicked the sequencer and walked out. The onus is heavily on the singers to carry the weight, and it doesn't always work." In Melody Maker, Taylor Parkes deemed it "a mess, albeit a hugely affecting one, a stop-gap, when three more months spent on arrangements and production would have fastered a masterpiece to surpass Maxinquaye". At the end of 1996, Nearly God was voted the 19th best album of the year in the Pazz & Jop, an annual poll of American critics nationwide, published by The Village Voice. Robert Christgau, the poll's creator, later gave it a one-star honorable mention, indicating "a worthy effort consumers attuned to its overriding aesthetic or individual vision may well like". He cited "Together Now" and "Children's Story" as highlights and felt the record indulged in a sluggishness "true Tricky albums only play with". As of September 2003 it has sold 54,000 copies in United States according to Nielsen SoundScan. In naming it trip hop's eighteenth greatest album, John Twells and Laurent Fintoni of FACT Magazine wrote: "What sounds like it could have been a self-indulgent victory lap for (back then) one of the UK’s most notorious stars is somehow a coherent, exemplary document of a peculiar time