Shadow man

Tricky's Nearly God is a dark beauty of a collaboration

by Stephanie Zacharek

Tricky's Maxinquaye (Island) was one of the angriest, loveliest, most alluring and shattering albums of last year, and though it didn't attract a large following, the fact that it came from left field only makes it more potent. The breakthrough release (it topped many critics' year-end lists) by British trip-hop singer, producer, and songwriter Tricky -- also featuring the liquid-velvet voice of a singer known as Martine -- Maxinquaye was eloquent and brutal, blood-rich as the deep purple of a bruise. You didn't need to hear Tricky's cover of Public Enemy's "Black Steel" to know that this was an outsider's album: you couldn't miss the slow-boil anger simmering beneath the languorous, rustling melodies, or avoid the bitterness, frustration, and fear tucked among the jagged, fragmented lyrics. I felt shredded after I first heard Maxinquaye, but also exhilarated, hyper-aware, pissed off, and oddly subdued, as if I'd been slipped some kind of ancient-secret muscle relaxant. It's one of those rare albums that feels like a dangerous encounter, but it sideswipes you, as if you'd jerked awake from a dream about big jungle cats, feeling certain one had actually brushed by you in your sleep.

Tricky's latest project, Nearly God (Durban Poison/Island, in stores August 13), a collaboration with a number of artists including Martine, Björk, Terry Hall, Neneh Cherry, and Alison Moyet (and released under the pseudonym Nearly God), picks up where Maxinquaye left off, at least in terms of its sound textures. (Another new work, the more strictly hip-hop-influenced EP Tricky Presents Grassroots, is also available, on Payday/ffrr.) There's nothing on Nearly God as harrowing as Maxinquaye's "Strugglin' " -- almost seven minutes of Tricky's feverish, fractured, hunted-animal vocals ("They label me insane -- but, um, I think I'm more normal than most") intercut with samples of a tap dripping, flickers of siren sounds, floorboards creaking, and a trigger being cocked. And yet many of the songs on Nearly God seem to take their cue from "Strugglin' " in terms of their warily desperate tone, and Tricky's artfully blended clutch of sound samples and instrumental snippets. These new songs are less overtly about racial and cultural isolation and more about romantic dislocation, though the more you listen, the more you realize that whispers of all those themes swirl through the album like ghostly dust storms.

Nearly God rings with the abject loneliness of train tunnels, power transformers, and brightly lit parks at night, even as it embraces the creepy beauty of those things. Most numbers feature Tricky's vocals along with at least one other artist, and his voice -- something between a gasp and a throaty whisper -- is the single biggest anchor, albeit an ethereal one. "Poems" features Tricky, Hall, and Martine, each singing one of the looping verses against an echoey, tick-tocking sample that gives the song the austerity of a Japanese garden. Everyone sings the pivotal line ("You promised me poems") to suggest a different meaning of the word "betrayal" -- regret flourishes here like a wild tropical flower. "I rue the day that I ever met you/I deeply regret you getting close to me," Hall sings in his pale, breathy voice, the most plaintive of the three. Tricky sounds the most bitter and accusatory ("I don't understand you, I don't want your time of day"), but when he reaches the central line, he sounds weary and drained, as if whatever it was that was promised and not delivered meant more to him than he can bear to let on.

"Keep Your Mouth Shut," one of Tricky's numbers with Björk, opens ominously, dank industrial power-plant noises getting intercut with a stock tough-guy rap sample that goes "Well, if the ladies think I'm stuck up, I tell 'em shut the fuck up." Björk's vocals, tinny and distant, cut through the song like a ray of hopeful light: she sounds like an angel singing her message through a vacuum-cleaner hose. Tricky, in a coarse growl, keeps yanking the song back into a menacing corner: "Better keep your mouth shut, baby/Keep it close to your chest." It could be a slurry pimp's warning, a threat -- but as the song moves on, it comes to sound more like an urgent bit of advice, an acknowledgment of what's needed to survive. "Not going down that road, not going down that road," Tricky intones in a voice loaded with terror and dread, as if he were backing away from a shadow figure coming after him with open shackles.

But maybe most striking of all is Tricky and Martine's version of "Black Coffee," which reclaims the old Sarah Vaughan standard from k.d. lang's more recent, facile version. Martine's rubato phrasing intensifies the song's restlessness. "I'm talking to the shadows/One o'clock till four/And lord how slow the moments go/All I do is pour black coffee," she sings, the words shambling out of her grasp. They find their own loose, lanky time against a repeating motif of angular piano samples that have been snapped into shards, cushioned periodically by soft tufts of cello. Listless, frightening, and starkly beautiful, this "Black Coffee" has deep, dark circles under its eyes. Sleep is a thing of the past, Tricky seems to be telling us. In his world, staying awake and alert -- even against the languid grooves of trip-hop -- is the only way to stay alive.