The first fifteen seconds of “Council Estate,” the lead single off of Knowle West Boy neatly recapitulate the past decade of Tricky’s maddening, mystifying career. For those few seconds, the eccentric strings and clattering home-baked percussion out of which Tricky constructed his most enduring work fumble out of the speakers, but before tension takes hold, a phalanx of guitardrumbass arrives and tramples any trace of oddity. The lockstep two-note turnaround, Tricky’s strict adherence to the flat meter, the sheer naked exposure of his feral-tom growl leaves nothing to the imagination, and not much else at all besides. The song is not bad; it’s just unsurprising, which from someone as obdurate, cranky and strange as Tricky is an exquisite form of disappointment.
Tricky got tenure as the reluctant Chair of Trip Hop with an impossibly strong string of albums running from his debut Maxinquaye through Angels With Dirty Faces, whose unremitting grit-beneath-the-fingernails gloom was like digging a coffin out of a sandpit with bare hands, scratchy grains skittering across varnished wood. After dramatizing his departure from major labels in confrontational, Princely fashion on “Divine Comedy,” Tricky was diagnosed with candida – a kind of yeast allergy with serious effects on mood.
Adjusting his diet accordingly, the exorcised Tricky started trying to make records that appealed to people, in the process alienating almost all of the people that cared about his music in the first place. When Blowback came out, marking his return and newfound amiability in a fit of ill-advised media accessibility, Tricky went on the mercifully short-lived Doritos Sessions to be interviewed by a SoCal wannabe toothpaste model. The interview was fantastic entertainment, a muddling of accents and universes seldom surpassed; the album, with guest slots by various Red Hot Chili Peppers, Cyndi Lauper, Ed Kowalczyk and, ahem, Alanis Morissette, paled in comparison.
Tricky Spotted in North Kilt Town
So, without turning a yeast allergy into Samson’s hair, there are some bona fide circumstantial reasons for Tricky’s tendency to color within the lines. Tricky will never find an alter-ego as supple, as sphinx-like as Martina Topley-Bird: fey where he was witchy, melodic where he was gruff, coy where he was, sort of, coy. His Bristol peers went and turned trip hop into the name to drop while Tricky maintained he didn’t know what they were talking about. No one should hold a bid for the music-purchasing viewership of the Doritos Sessions against the guy. But three albums into Tricky’s pop period, it’s sometimes hard to remember why the rest of us once cared, and still do, about his particular species of whimsical, bespoke paranoia, which suggests not so much that they are out to get you as that you are.
Knowle West Boy’s popism is not without its perks: the cover of a certain Miss Kylie Minogue’s “Slow” is sleazily arch, Tricky slurring his come-ons like a well-hung drunkard. “Veronika” nails a Rihanna-esque curve of melody to a gated, fractured rhythm with all the tenderness of blades in a meat-processing plant; it sounds like the soundtrack to a GTA snuff film easter egg. But picking those cherries requires wading through a daunting quantity of bombast that never quite comes down on the side of tongue-in-cheek nor genuine threat. When Tricky traced the span of his glowering whisper to a ragged roar on Blowback’s “Bury The Evidence,” it was as though he’d decided, for once, to screw together all the disparate elements he used to scatter around songs into a cohesive whole, one turn at a time. By comparison, “C’mon Baby” is weak sauce, a knock-kneed knockoff stuck in third gear.
The lurking question in all late-period Tricky albums is whether he’s lost – or abandoned – the sonic curiosity that made for legitimate comparisons to Tom Waits, another gravelly-voiced auteur. And Knowle West Boy – whose cover obscures the glowering headshot which adorned Angels with mask that is part carnival, part blank white mime – does little to compete with the genderbending meta-games of his peak. Contrived rather than composed, a clutch of songs held together by little more than the idea that they refer to Tricky’s childhood in a Bristol slum, the gestures are depressingly empty – the pathos of the “Council Estate” refrain “Remember, boy, you’re a superstar” seemingly unintended – Knowle West Boy slides worryingly close to rote, something Tricky seemed incapable of only a couple of albums ago.
So forgive me if I invest rather a lot in “Coalition,” the unassuming best track nestled obscurely at the heart of the album. The lyrics are flat-out silly – “Would you go on and on like… Duracell? / Durex? NoFX? Yeah, sex on sale” – but Tricky’s lyrics are simply a means to an end. The seamless grunt at the song’s base has the same DNA as the undistinguished rawk on the rest of the album, but this time Tricky layers on a swell of increasingly panicked strings, blending and swooping like a school of cornered fish that finally turn carnivorous. Tricky stumbles and fidgets with his words, never quite fitting the cast of the simpleminded groove. In the end the song sort of peters out, Tricky unable to finish his lines, as though he’d reached the edge of a cliff. What happens next depends on where his curiosity takes him.
Written By Andrew Iliff
Download:
MP3: Tricky-“Council Estate”
MP3: Tricky-“Coalition”
