CD of the week
David Bennun
What, you might reasonably be entitled to ask, has the mad little bugger done this time? If the idea of the new Tricky album, Juxtapose (Island), doesn’t fill you with the same eager anticipation that it once might have, you’re not alone. Even those of us who consider him one of the most original individual recording artists of the decade all but ran out of patience around the time of his last album, Angels With Dirty Faces.
>From his debut, Maxinquaye, one of the best albums of our time, to the dank, uninspired Angels was a steep descent indeed.
Tricky has a way of letting things go to his head – anything and everything. You name it, it’s racing towards the mind of Tricky with the devil at its trainer-shod heels. This makes him a very interesting individual, and fun to be around, as long as he doesn’t suddenly decide that you, too, are out to get him.
But the acclaim has had a detrimental effect on his music, because he reacts to external pressures, real or imagined, so strongly.
Thus his second album, Pre- Millennium Tension, was a brutal wrench in the direction of dissonance, wilfully lurching down a thorny path where no one among his horde of instant imitators would dare follow. It had brilliant moments, and will probably be recognised as a great record in years to come, but it was a bastard on the ears.
As for Angels, it wasn’t a terrible album, because Tricky’s innate skill as a producer probably would not allow him to make such a thing, but a drab one. It was hard to avoid the suspicion that Tricky had burned himself out, that his festering paranoia and resentment had stopped feeding his talent and instead begun to stifle it. Well, Juxtapose has put us right on that score. It bears only the remotest resemblance to anything Tricky has done before. Teaming up with DJ Muggs, Cypress Hill’s backbone, and DMX producer Grease, Tricky has made a startling and sometimes even charming record.
-Not that it’s any more cheerful than usual. His customary obsessions and neuroses are dancing the Watusi across his frontal lobes as vigorously as ever. Does he or doesn’t he want to be a tough guy, a gangster? “No” seems to be the answer every time – eventually. Why is life apparently one form of suffocation after another? Because when you feel everything that keenly, the slightest contact is bound to seem stifling. Why’s everybody always picking on him? Well, he’s small and skinny and odd. And, more to the point, paranoid.
-It is Tricky’s gift to render these rather dreary fixations engrossing – when he’s on form, at any rate, which he is on most of Juxtapose. Perhaps feeling freed from the terrible stigma of inadvertently inventing trip-hop, and from the oxymoronic expectation among his audience that he startle them, Tricky has brought a lightness of touch and a refreshing sense of melody to the album. There are acoustic guitars all over, just as there are on chart R&B these days, but there the similarity ends. Bom Bom Diggy and She Said (echoes of Revolver) are as sinister as connoisseurs of musical claustrophobia could hope for.
-Contradictive, with its moody, crooned chorus, is sublime. Hot Like A Sauna matches such early Tricky masterstrokes as Pumpkin without seeming to repeat them. London rapper Mad Dog’s guest spot on I Like The Girls is filthy, funny and transparent; “reminded me of a dream I had at 15” its most telling lyric. What a coincidence – me too.
-There you go, then. Tricky is still worth pricking up your ears for. He can still produce records that are a pleasure to listen to. And while it seems contradictory to praise an album for how little of it there is, at 35 minutes Juxtapose is in no danger of outstaying its welcome. Maybe this means he has the grace to know when to wrap things up. Maybe he ran out of material. You never know. They used to call him Tricky Kid – predictable he isn’t.