Tricky
Mixed Race

Tricky, nocturnal poet, with smoke in your mouth and a penetrating gaze, you are just a fool. You've managed to deceive half the world with your first, devastating albums (“Maxinquaye” and “Angels With Dirty Faces” above all, wonderful), only to then lose yourself in the trap of mediocrity.

Decline due to aging? The desire to always be trendy? The need to make money once a label was created? Well, my dear Tricky, I already started losing you at the time of that very difficult “Juxtapose,” praised left and right, but completely incomprehensible and affected. And then “Blowback” and “Vulnerable,” beautiful and lively (especially the latter), but with the risk of becoming mundane by the second listen.

And in those moments of slight pop tendencies, you still managed to create some beautiful songs (That rotating bomb of "Evolution Revolution Love" capable of making the drills spin to the rhythm of music, the repressed sensuality of a very fierce "Stay", the delightful cover of "The Lovecats" by The Cure), but then, the catastrophe.

Can you tell me what the hell happened to you? A transitional album after five years and another one just arrived, “Mixed Race,” that seems like a requiem of a child's despair in the face of a failing grade in math. Crooked and nocturnal as much as you want, fine, but destabilizing (and not in a positive way) to an all-time low.

“Mixed Race” is, just to rub salt in the wound, useless and pedantic, a chic and luxurious sedative for those who live on vacuity. Songs (ten, all about two and a half minutes long) that sound like b-sides of a lounge one-hit wonder group that would like to cover nursery rhymes.

There's an embarrassing attempt to reinterpret trip-hop in a modern key, as emerges from a horrible nursery rhyme, “Early Bird,” which wouldn’t even have the dignity of an embryonic version of an electro piece by Anna Tatangelo, or worse, to copy Daft Punk’s “Technologic” in the dreadful “Kingston Logic” or to throw it on Middle Eastern music with temptations from David Guetta discovering the East in duet with Hevia (Hakim).

Sure, a nice “Ghetto Stars,” powerful and nasty to the right point, but also able to warm the spirits and then fill them with crudeness and muck and an interesting trip into feminine darkness called “Every Day” seem to lift the fate of an artist lost in self-parody and of an album that should not come to be, but then around the corner, like a crazy bogeyman, appears a half reggae “Come To Me,” with jazzy attempts, which seems endless, despite its honest duration.

“Naked Weapon” is a lazy attempt to create something that grabs the listener with a booty-shaking movement but quickly ends up in aural coma. “Time To Dance” vainly attempts sensuality in its barely two minutes, but no sane person would have sex with this techno lullaby in the background, nose held high. “Really Real” seems to come from the b-sides of Gorillaz’s “Plastic Beach” (another very disappointing comeback), with a chorus as drunk as you like but annoying enough that it can at least boast an inspiring use of the synth.

Closes with “Bristol To London,” a fast-moving, cheeky little tune, with rap jabs on whispering rhythms and crazy synths that quickly flows and stops shortly after.

And then? And then that's it. The record is over. Twenty-nine minutes of nonsense, which excluding three tracks (Ghetto Stars, Every Day, Bristol To London), could have been spared.

Is the nocturnal poet of Bristol either pulling our leg or plotting some kind of self-destruction maneuver? Who knows, in the meantime, I place this insult in the “memory box,” lock the padlock, and resume, happy and afflicted with Alzheimer's, “Maxinquaye” hoping for better days, when Bristol will once again roar, whisper, assault words of pain and beauty.

And thank goodness there's a certain Beth Gibbons still able to disturb and move, even though trip-hop has inexorably turned into a black-and-white memory.