The Perfect Chord looks back at albums you may have missed when they dropped, or miss now that they've faded from memory. This week's glimpse into the crates:
Tricky – Pre-Millenium Tension
Less than ten seconds of Pre-Millenium Tension’s forty-five minutes elapse before the world ends completely–not with a bang, but a backmasked, delayed electric guitar sample that, without warning, segues into two fast, four-measure samples of a jazz drum fill, spliced together awkwardly to form a beat that stumbles forward in a jerky, almost arrhythmic gait that would be charming—even poppy—if not for the fact that it neither stops, nor serves as a bridge into something else. For the entirety of the song’s three minutes, the beat scrambles forward, the incongruously slow guitar sample warbling in the background, coalescing quickly into a song that, despite its low-key elements, feels as abrasive as thrash metal, especially when a rasping, weed-damaged voice hisses above the din, merging bitter observations on a sour relationship (“she’s the one makes me feel these ways”) with statements of aggressive bombast, taking a blatant reprise of the Furious Five’s “don’t push me, ‘cause I’m close to the edge/I’m tryin’ hard not lose my head” and turning it into a statement of paranoid self-reflection, capped by a simple refrain, one equally desperate and threatening: “can hardly breathe.”
By 1996, two albums into his career, British eccentric Adrian “Tricky” Thaws found himself entangled in both the fame that accompanied international critical acclaim (largely for his 1995 debut album Maxinquaye) and the infamy implicit to pioneering (if not inventing) a new form of music. While he and his contemporaries in the “trip-hop” scene (Portishead and Massive Attack, the latter of which he co-founded) were constantly pushing the boundaries of downtempo electronic and pop music, the somewhat-pejorative label proved simultaneously catchy and irritatingly inescapable. Each of the three entities handled their frustration in different ways; while Massive Attack expanded deeper into goth-inflected pop and Portishead edged closer and closer into psychedelic rock, Tricky elected to completely abandon any semblance of coherent genre appeal. Taking advantage of a clause in his recording contract with Island Records allowing him to release an album a year under a different name, he released the sprawling, wildly inconsistent Nearly God (a quasi-collaborative effort heavily featuring, among many others, Neneh Cherry and Specials vocalist Terry Hall). With another album due for Island and wanting, by his own admission, to create a “punk” record, Tricky unveiled Pre-Millenium Tension less than seven months later.
The album detours sharply from the post-hip hop plod of Maxinquaye and the abstract, goth-inflected experimentalism of Nearly God. “Vent,” with its unabashed heaviness (indeed, when Tricky pursued a heavier rock sound in the mid-2000s, he would close his sets with twenty-minute, distorted guitar-heavy versions of the song) takes a turn for the strange during its second verse, when Tricky’s collaborator Martina Topley-Bird enters the fray. Topley-Bird’s voice—a versatile, honeyed entity as ethereal and transcendent as Tricky’s is damaged and abrasive—swims through the cacophony, singing the exact same melody as her counterpart, only an octave higher, playing the aggressive, sadistic female yang to the male yin (“I’m the one who hides his medicine/watch him stop breathe…"). Topley-Bird echoes Tricky’s words as the song fades out—only this time, the “can’t hardly breathe” sounds almost terrifyingly pleasant, as it suggests she has either killed him or—even more chillingly–is him.
This notion of symbiotic, interchangeable masculine and feminine identity wasn’t new to Tricky even so early in his career—but never was as deftly executed as it is on Tension, especially on the album’s second track (also its first single): “Christiansands.” At first listen, especially through inadequate speakers, the song sounds almost completely divorced from “Vent,” with its hushed vocals and even, jazzy drumbeat; however, closer inspection reveals a menace almost darker than the more obvious song, with the most aggressively low-pitched bassline since Digital Underground’s “The Humpty Dance,” a two-note monster equally indebted to dub and doom metal. The song (arguably Tricky’s most well-known song Stateside) picked up a considerable amount of pop traction following its appearances just about everywhere (notably in a scene of John Woo’s Face/Off featuring Tricky himself), with good reason: its demonic menace, enhanced by Topley-Bird’s sugary hook, is as catchy as it is disturbing.
It’s a testament to Tricky’s own maniacal sense of humor that he waits until Tension’s third cut to present any music that sounds definitively like Trip-Hop. “Tricky Kid” (whose title refers to his original pen name as a member of The Wild Bunch, the Bristol-based hip hop collective that would eventually become Massive Attack) builds around a slow, downbeat funk sample and hiccupping drumbeat, while the man himself lays down a snarling flow referencing his own b-boy roots: “They used to call me Tricky Kid/I live the life they wish they did/I live the life, don’t own a car/but now they call me ‘superstar’.” The song also highlights the album’s direct reggae influence (undoubtedly colored by Tricky having recorded the album in Jamaica), as does album centerpiece “Ghetto Youth,” which features a half-spoken, half-chanted vocal by Jamaican MC known only as Sky. The track, the album’s longest, is also its most sedate, with a series of subtle samples triggered beneath a guitar droning the same B5 chord throughout, indirectly showcasing Tricky’s greatest strength: his penchant for restraint, knowing exactly how much needs to be put into a song without cluttering it up too much. The restraint (and reggae leanings) appear in the album’s second single as well, the deceptively calm “Makes Me Wanna Die,” with dub-inflected guitars scraping across a bass-less arrangement illuminated by Topley-Bird’s lazy vocal spirals (and Tricky’s barely-audible whispers).
Fortunately, however, he doesn’t spend too much time dwelling on long-winded reggae meandering. Tension’s latter half proves to be even stronger than its more accessible first. “Sex Drive” launches back into noise, with Tricky and Topley-Bird free-associatively rhyming over a percussive section carried by rattling hi-hats, tapping snares, and kung-fu-film punching sound effects. A snarling distorted guitar counter-intuitively hides behind the song’s bassline, a repetitive minor-key scale; a harmonica (Tricky’s own) hooting distractedly over the entire thing. The drums-free “Bad Things” begins deceptively subtle, but progresses into a noise-filled musique concrete/free-jazz collage; two songs later, Tricky and Topley-Bird duet on the alarming “My Evil Is Strong,” whose off-time drum beats are punctuated by distant machine-gun fire and (much) closer pistol shots. The latter song’s fluttering bass line (itself accompanied by a sampled percussive bass pluck) dances in a happy-sounding major key progression that sounds extremely off-putting amidst the sounds of violence and the duo snarling that they’ve “even got God scared.”
Two songs in Tension’s last quarter represent the purest, most remarkable expressions of Tricky’s genius: immediately preceding “Evil” is a cover of Eric B and Rakim’s “Lyrics Of Fury.” With a jazz drummer playing live, Topley-Bird raps, with Tricky’s samples and keyboards rattling subwoofers; while the overall effect of a supermodel-gorgeous young woman rapping lyrics penned by archetypically masculine males was hardly a novel juxtaposition even in the mid-1990s—the pair themselves had attempted the same trick twice before, covering Public Enemy’s “Black Steel In The Hour Of Chaos” on Maxinquaye and Slick Rick’s “Children’s Story” on Nearly God–with “Lyrics Of Fury,” the concept finally gels effectively, with the song’s energy practically dancing through the speakers. Conversely, the album-closing “Piano,” with its droning two-chord piano and somber percussive samples (most of which sound like Tricky either gasping, wheezing, or sighing), drags the energy to a grinding, glacial stop; rather than obliterate the paranoid, skittish mood, the song takes the previous forty minutes’ set-up and knocks a home run. Tricky’s sprechesang vocals march conversationally through the arrangement, sounding simultaneously conquering and utterly vulnerable; paired with his performance on “Vent,” it creates a fantastic bookend effect, framing Pre-Millenium Tension as a chaotic, dark, oppressively heavy journey whose cathartic climax is simply a man managing to carry a song on his own.
Fortunately, “Piano” wouldn’t be the last time listeners would find him so triumphant. While not as well-received as Maxinquaye, Tension continued Tricky’s unqualified dominance at the forefront of Trip Hop (even as he resisted the label). Already an in-demand producer and collaborator, he either appeared on, produced, or otherwise had a hand on recordings by artists as diverse as Live, Bush, Garbage, and Björk (among many others). In the late 90s, he moved from England to New York, where he lived until 2001, and released four more albums before taking a five-year hiatus in 2003. In 2008, he returned, and remains an active recording, touring, and production force even today. Topley-Bird, on the other hand, split from Tricky in 1998; after spending most of the rest of the 1990s largely silent (but for a pair of appearances on Primus’s Antipop album), she released her first solo album in 2003. Quixotic (featuring two Tricky-produced songs) didn’t make much of an impact in the United States, but blew up in England, where it was a finalist for the prestigious Mercury Prize. The Blue God followed in 2008; two years later, she released Some Place Simple (an album consisting primarily of re-worked, stripped-down arrangements of selections from the previous two albums) and, simultaneously (and unexpectedly) joined Massive Attack for their album (Heligoland) and subsequent tour. Both artists still perform Pre-Millenium Tension cuts on tour, proving the album’s energy—and impact—hasn’t faded a bit.
A. Darryl Moton is a freelance writer/Iowan/curmudgeon. He doesn’t live much of a life, owns a car, and no one calls him superstar. Yet.
The post Music: The Perfect Chord From @darrylzero: Tricky appeared first on The Good Men Project.
