Tricky
Pre-Millennium Tension

THE REVIEW

It takes a lot of guts to slam a Tricky album (I can already imagine the fleet of negative comments against me), especially when he's one of your favorite artists, and you also feel a tinge of guilt. But this album didn't excite me in the least. Maybe it's too ahead of its time to be understood, too cool to be hated, but I find nothing interesting about it.

Everyone is shouting about a miracle: on Debaser's database, a beautifully written review appreciates the album's sonic qualities and praises them, the comments do the same. But this third album has only a couple of masterpieces: the poignant "Christiansands," where the sounds become hard and decisive toward a point of no return. A static and sonic elegy like a cyclone dragging the listener into the eye of the storm. Pure trip hop kleptomania. The other great track is "Makes Me Wanna Die," one of the highest peaks ever reached by the boy from the Bristolian ghetto, with a Martina Topley Bird in a state of grace who caresses the eardrums with her sweet and accentuated sigh, while words of splendid meaning unravel over a truly enviable rhythmic structure.

These are two tracks to have, in every sense, but for the rest, the album drifts into emptiness. A nice start (beautiful but passable "Vent") and some well-accentuated melodies (pleasant "Bad Dreams") don't save the final score: almost irritating rap tropicalisms ("Ghetto Youth"), useless and inconclusive passages ("Piano"), innovative but not engaging sounds ("Lyrics Of Fury") negate all the beauty of the more successful songs.

Tricky is a great musician, but he is also a man, and like all men, he makes mistakes. This is one of his mistakes.

If it had come from an unknown artist on the trip hop scene, I would have been lenient, but since he's the one who created masterpieces like "Maxinquaye" or "Nearly God," I can't forgive.