Tricky
Knowle West Boy

2008: The Return of Trip Hop?

After Portishead's album (so-so), A.D. 2008 also marks the return of the skewed elf from Bristol: Tricky.

Our friend, after having canonized Trip-Hop as a genre first with the collaboration with his fellow Massive Attack, then with the immortal "Maxinquaye" ("karmakoma... what? ...Jamaican Aroma ...karmakoma ...what? ...Jamaican Aroma..."), had progressively lost his edge, releasing albums ranging from acceptable ("Angels with Dirty Faces") to unlistenable (the last "Vulnerable" dated 2003) which had brought good old Adrian to a dangerous creative burnout. So, the elf hid himself, disappeared among the crowd in New York, returning to living on the street and thinking "street", thinking back to his childhood/adolescence in the popular district of Bristol, that Knowle West which gives the title to his latest work.

So Tricky (finally!) returns to making good music, intensely felt and full of ideas: it starts with a retro-futuristic "Puppy Toy", featuring guitars, piano, and female vocals, moves to a languid cover of Kyle Minogue and Emiliana Torrini's "Slow", features a hoarse Tricky in a highly inspired Tom Waits version, dances with pumped rhythms, and includes dense dark electro music.

Fundamentally, the album can ideally be divided into two parts. One part is more purely Trip-Hop derivative where the lion's share is taken by the single "Council Estate" with its tight rhythms and a nervous Tricky, the track "Joseph" (featuring an unknown Jamaican singer met on the street), a kind of return to trip-past, the excellent "Cross to Bear", a velvety mix of Bristolian atmospheres and almost Balkan and oriental music, and one of the best songs of the batch: "Past Mistake", slow and dense third millennium soul music.
The second part of the album is more blatantly black: the extraordinary impact of electronic bases with the sound of cellos in "Coalition" (moreover with an interesting quote from Gil Scott Heron), the almost stomp-tight rhythm of "Veronika" (with the female vocals of the new muse Veronica Cassuolo, a true Torinese from CasaSonica) and with "School Gates", a very dark semi-ballad with a country flavor.

The album also contains some rather questionable songs (above all, the shameful "C'man Baby" and a couple of "seanpaul" moments that could have been spared), but these are forgivable slips in style, given the rather high overall quality.

One regret: where has Martina Topley-Bird gone? Even now, if I listen to "Black Steel" from the first album, her voice gives me chills.