Tricky
Pre-Millenium Tension

Have you ever found yourself locked inside the cold chamber of a morgue with a toe tag between your toes? Or buried three meters underground in a suit and tie in a bare oak coffin? Well, then you know the state of mind evoked by an immense and terribly distressing and claustrophobic album like this "Pre-Millennium Tension" by Tricky from 1996.
A dark and hypnotic album that becomes a slow and relentless descent into the inferno of a mind (his) irreparably damaged and deviant (listen to the initial "Vent") reinventing a genre (trip hop, in fact "almost" his creation) and placing it on a thin blue line between mental insanity and full lucidity of the decay of which our artist becomes an advocate ("Christiansands").

In these 11 tracks, you can fully breathe in all the sub-urban decay of metropolises, and a constant sense of alienation accompanies us to different borderline and sick places, the same ones frequented or, more likely, dwelling among the warped folds of Tricky's mind (exemplary "Tricky Kid" as a summary of this). An album that, upon its release, caused a stir and wonder among the music critics (and not) around the world: Melody Makers: "Will every musician, every other artist, have to confront this?", The Guardian: "Pre-Millennium Tension is a shocking album.", The Time: "If there were an Apocalypse now, this is the sound it would have.", Mixmag: "Far from anything heard until today."

An album that does not deny itself moments of alienated musical poetry (the track "Makes Me Wanna Die" sung by a Martina in a state of grace) to then let us fall back into the ongoing desolation on dub-like bases of a Tricky overdosed in another dimension ("Ghetto Youth"). Again down, into the infernal circles of "Sex Drive" or the psy-lysergic atmospheres of "Bad Things" or the syncopated funky "Lyrics of Fury". The splendid subsequent "My Evil is Strong" is constructed on a NON-time, absolutely without musical meter, over a delirious and hallucinatory monologue by our artist, which shares with us a piece of inimitable free-jazz-triphop. The concluding "Piano" returns to more accessible registers with a piano, indeed, played in a hypnotic and obsessive manner (two chords throughout the track) that serves as a sound carpet to a liberating monologue that becomes almost an invocation of redemption, an apocryphal prayer requesting help from "someone" who could be us but can scarcely be fulfilled by anyone, for the objective impossibility of putting oneself in the shoes of a musician incredibly ahead of his time and who will find his "easy turn" (if you'll allow me the frankly unbalanced term) with subsequent works at the turn of the century.

Beautiful and distressing like few others, certainly not his masterpiece which, in my opinion, will always remain "Maxinquaye". Recommended, needless to say, for lovers of the genre.