In 1953, at the height of his popularity, the Maerican abstract expressionist dauber Mark Rithko was comissioned to paint a series of design for the Four Seasons Restaurant in New York's Seagram's Building. Rothko's response was such: "This is a place where the richest bastards in New York come to feed and show off. I hope to ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room. I want them to feel that all they can do is butt their heads against the wall. Forever."
   The history of artists who hate their audience is a rich one. Miles Davis, Lou Reed, Bob Dylan: all have, at one time or another, made extreme shifts in order to distance themselves from the unthinking fans who dared to admire them int he first place. With 'Pre-Millennium Tension', Tricky may feel that he is continuin in this grand tradition, but, although there is much here that fits into the same 'classic' category as Massive Attack's 'Blue Lines' and 'Maxinquaye'. 'PMT' also comes complete with the requisite dollops of pig-headed self-undulgence.
    Probably the msot influential album of the last five years, 'Maxinquaye' becamse the key reference point in the emergence of the hwole trip hop scene and its every descending quality lineage from Portishead and Moloko to 12 Rounds. As it nestled comfortably between Simple Minds and U2 in moneyed front rooms throughout the land - a concession to muscial weirditude, daling - Tricky retreated from the limelight. Whether the result of a geniune belief in artistic purity, or simply the paranoid side-effects of too much high-grade smoke, the impression was of a star bedevilled by the monster he had created and desprerate to escape its clutches.
   After the demo-esque, I-Am-Not-Tricky statement of the Nearly God project, 'Pre-Millennium Tension' moves even further away from any notion of narkebility. Relocated to some ramshackle Jamaican studio hut, but sounding a tad more 'produced' than 'Nearly God', the overall mood is of intense oppression - 50 minutes inside the head of the most paranoid man in pop.
   Allegedly 'influenced' by those generous portions of high-calibre weed Tricky now smokes to combat his asthma, opening track, 'Vent' is effectively the album's statement of intent. A schizoid can't-hardly-breathe funk of flu and rheumy sickness, it quotes Grandlaster Flash's 'The Message' ("Don't push me cos I'm close to the edge / I'm trying not to lose my head"), before dragging the album into a well of wheezy despondency from which it never fully recovers.
   The single, 'Christiansands', carries on the gloom baton. A palsied tirade against the cliches of relationship - "Forever / What does that mean? / You and me / What does that mean? / It means we'll manage" - it is given an unnerving twist by the fact that the most obvious target of this verbal assault, co-singer Martine, is now also the mother of Tricky's kid, Maisie. We are entering a very sick world indeed.
   However, like Tricky himself, it's now very easy to become bored by trademark breathy muttering and bastard breaks - the chidren of trip hop have stolen the original Tricky sound and it isn't really until the third track, 'Tricky Kid', that any real sense of escape is estrablished. Sporting a particularly cancerous pair of lungs and backed by some unidentified homunculus gibbering "Tell me what you see when you look in mama's