| TRICKY DOES IT DIFFERENTLY IN PARIS / JUSTINE JOINS A POST-ROCK JAM | ||
| ONE IN A MILLEMIUM TRICKY OLYMPIA, PARIS | ||
| IF evil exists, then this is the sound of its alarmed advancement. This is its early warning smell, the encroaching dankness of doubt, the smothering ceiling of slow-creeping despair which is pitched at an intensely personalised height. You know how it goes: on good days, The End seems higher than the sun; on bad days, you practically have to duck to make it through. Tricky has claimed the badlands of the psyche as his very own territory pretty much from the start. And whether you reckon his paranoia is 4 Real, a case of artistic expediency (millennium fever is raging right now, for obvious reasons) or simply the result of way too much weed, there's no denying the power of his introspection. What's truly great about Tricky is the fact that the more his world vision seems to fold ... itself, the tighter he ...lls the wrap of his own fractured reality around himself, the more he says about The Big Picture. Big Pictures, of course, demand Big Soundtracks and tonight Tricky’s posse score something truly breathtaking. Something brutal, bold and beautiful that’s typically alienated and alienating, yet as far removed from the wheezy, | freaked and fragmented expression of the
new album as Bristol is from Brazil. Forget the Tricky of recent live outings, smouldering slow and strung-out, wreathed in a pall of his own cigarette/spliff smoke and hunched over the mic in near darkness; tonight he’s decided to let loose the wriggling hell that's been bolted down too long inside of him, allowed it to hook up with its roots and married it to rock to see how it runs. It runs fine. You can still slice the atmosphere with a knife, of course, but the psychosis and confusion, the uncertainty and mistrust that make up Tricky’s misanthropy are given a bigger stage to play on. Songs like the block-funky "Christiansands" relax and sprawl out for hypnotic aeons, shifting their emphasis from the ferociously personal to the undeniably universal. Tricky himself is a column of nervous energy, darting from mic to drum riser and back, bouncing agitatedly on the spot and jabbing the air with his elbows like a boxer in his corner seconds before the first bell. Martina may be singing like a siren from her rock of sweet reason there on the right, but he's jumpin’. "Vent" — a brief embittered croak on record - now summons the combined paranoid intensity of Suicide, MN and Cabaret Voltaire for an insaner malevolent, thunderous groove with tiny saw-toothed guitar eruptions and Muddy Waters' spirit at its | repetitive, heavy-rifting core. It seems like he could be about to execute a Moby turn, but that would be too obvious; Tricky’s iust showing more of his blues/dub roots than usual. So, "Tricky Kid” (with that lyric — "coke in your nose/now catch your gold fronts ’— so blatantly addressed to Goldie) is a neurotic rap that verges on psychobabble, with its urgent need to fill the void lest it swallow him forever, but the loose skanking treatment turns it into a dub monster, tracing a clear path from King Tubby right through to Tricky's favourite band, The Specials, and clipping Stevie Wonder on the way. There’s a manic, high-stepping "Sex Drive" amid a brace of songs so radically reinterpreted it’s hard to tell where one stops and the next begins, then they're off, until a cacophony of mad stamping and catcalls brings them back for their volcanic rock treatment of PE’s "Black Steel", harsh white percussion reflecting in its gleaming flanks as it hurtles past. Not totally trip hop, then; rather less than rock; barely blues - Tricky throws a series of stylistic punches and steps back while we reel in their impressive wake. This music is more than just magic. It's very nearly. . . voodoo. SHARON O'CONNELL |
photo: Melanie Cox
from: Music Week, 23. November 1996
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concertography |