Sixteen years since Tricky clambered his way to trip-hop stardom with Maxinquaye — his 1994 debut — the 42-year-old musician has struggled to re-harness its vigor.
Even critically-acclaimed albums like 1996’s Pre-Millennium Tension and 1998’s Angels with Dirty Faces were too disheveled — and frighteningly off-kilter — to do much chart-climbing. By the early 2000s, Tricky’s work had lost its bristle.
Mixed Race, in this sense, is not an earth-shattering reprisal. It is not, as its creator insists, “a gangster album,” nor is it as “deliberately direct and in-your face,” as he imagines.
All in all, Tricky’s eagerly anticipated ninth solo album — clocking in at around 29 minutes — is really more blueprint than tour de force, but it’s certainly a step in the right direction.
It’s well-packaged, for one — fusing elements of dancehall, chain-gang blues, “cold-wave” disco, and Algerian rai — to frame what might be Tricky’s most staggeringly uptempo album yet.
He’s even snagged a bevy of indie undergrounders, like Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie and Jamaican DJ Terry Lynn, adding dimension to Mixed Race’s already scattered soundscape.
Tricky’s eclecticism is ambitious, risky, even. His frenetic stylings, after all, have regularly placed him at the fringes of his industry, but Mixed Race is far from oversexed.
What we receive — from the funked-out rhythms of “Every Day” to the feral “Bristol to London” — is a stark and scrubbed down trip-hop thriller where simplicity is brilliance.
Mixed Race opens with “Every Day”, a bluesy but repetitive groove surfeited with sparse backbeats and feverish croons.
It’s a modest opener, with all the meat nicely trimmed away, though what it lacks in braggadocio it makes up for in accessibility: It’s a fantastic intro for first time listeners, achieving a balance between the same musical sensuality and malaise that first propelled Tricky to stardom.
Yet Tricky also resists the trappings of trip-hop. In “Kingston Logic” — his twist on Daft Punk’s smash hit, “Technologic” — he serves up an infectious mix of hooks and drumbeats that soar freely over lighter, more danceable melodies.
It’s one of his more tightly-spun “uptempo” tracks, along with “Time to Dance,” where Tricky’s signature eeriness lingers, barely perceptible.
By the end of the album, though, it’s back to basics. Tricky embraces his swagger in unrulier tracks like “Murder Weapon” — Mixed Race’s first single — and his concluding track, “Bristol to London,” a collaboration with younger brother Marlon Thaws.
Aggressive and texture-rich, the pair present an unnerving and gritty portrait of “gangsterism” that Tricky claims anchors Mixed Race.
“This album is pretty ghetto,” the musician said in an interview with the Telegraph.
“I’ve had three people in family murdered. Two stabbings. One shooting. I’ve been all around all that but don’t have to act the tough guy. I know who I am.”
Oddly enough, Mixed Race’s standout tracks zero in on Tricky’s musical vulnerabilities. Bobby Gillespie’s croons are no substitute for Martina Topley’s Bird’s “honey-coated vox” on the sleek and sexy “Really Real,” a haunting piece that might as well have been plucked from Maxinequaye.
It doesn’t help that Tricky plays second fiddle to Gillespie for its entirety, save any behind-the-scenes compositional contributions.
Mixed Race isn’t Maxinequaye. The distortion, empty schisms, and violent rattles of Tricky’s earlier pursuits have been muffled by newfound self-restraint.
But behind their absence lies a wealth of subtleties marking a slow but sure approach to a breakthrough that, for Tricky, has always been a whisper away.
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