TRICKY with DJ MUGGS and GREASE
JUXTAPOSE
Island
****
What, you might reasonably be entitled to ask, has the mad little bugger done this time? If the idea of a new Tricky album 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 the most original individual recording artist this country has produced in the last decade all but ran out of patience around the time of his last LP, Angels With Dirty Faces. From a debut, Maxinquaye, which ranks among the best albums of our time - which would have been dazzling had it not been so intensely gloomy that it seemed to suck the light out of any room where it was played - to the dank, uninspired, dispiriting Angels was a steep descent indeed.
   Along the way, Tricky labelled himself Nearly God, for a collection of collaborations dubbed "Nearly Good" by waggish critics. The title was inspired by the lavish and deserved acclaim for Maxinquaye. 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 it has probably 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 to follow. It still had quite brilliant moments, and will probably be recognised as a significant electronic art-rock record in years to come, but it was a bastard on the ears, no question. As for Angels, it wasn't a terrible album, because Tricky's innate skill as a producer probably wouldn't allow him to make such a thing, but it was a drab one. It was hard to avoid the sad 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, and that lies mainly in his trademark mumble, and in his continuing perversion of traditional hip hop. Teaming up with DJ Muggs, Cypress Hill's backbone and no mean innovator himself, and DMX producer Grease, Tricky has made a genuinely startling and - would you credit it - sometimes 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 they ever did. Does he or doesn't he want to be a tough guy, a gangster? (No, seems to be the answer every time - eventually. He sensibly and admirably wants his daughter to grow up with all the advantages afforded by a respectable middle-class upbringing. And anyway, he's too small and skinny and odd. Still, that doesn't prevent him dwelling on the question at length, again and again.) 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's Tricky's gift to render these potentially 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 remarkable lightness of touch and a refreshing sense of melody to the album. There are acoustic guitars all over the shop, 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, as is the shuffling, strummed For Real. Hot Like A Sauna matches such early Tricky masterstrokes as Abbaon Fat Tracks and Pumpkin without for a second seeming to repeat them. London rapper Mad Dog's guest spot on I Like The Girls is filthy, funny and transparent, a happy-go-lucky letter from a braggart hip hop fantasist to a low-grade porn mag, the most telling lyric of which is, "Reminded me of a dream I had at 15." 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 true pleasure to listen to, rather than a cheerless duty born of admiration for his prowess. And while it may seem contradictory to praise an album for how little there is of it, at 35 minutes Juxtapose stands in no danger of outstaying its welcome. Maybe this means Tricky has the good grace to know when to wrap things up. Or maybe he merely ran out of material. You never know. They used to call him Tricky Kid. . . predictable, he isn't.
 

© David Bennun 

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