The enfant terrible of Bristol reconnects with density on a grand, mournful album that nevertheless carries the air of a resurrection.
We had thought him evaporated. Rightly so: already accustomed to thick veils of smoke, Tricky had frankly faded away over the last decade. Behind discreet projects, behind his collaboration with the Polish Marta (Out the Way). Behind grief and pain, too: the death of his daughter in 2019, a personal tragedy we need not revisit.
Nevertheless, when veteran manager Alan McGee hears the tracks the former enfant terrible of trip-hop is working on, he is convinced: this material could fuel a real new Tricky, closer to the miraculous sequence of his early records than to the more uncertain albums that followed. Some signs do not lie: there is even here a piece of absolute grace titled Piano, like the sublime meditation that closed the masterpiece Pre-Millennium Tension (1996).
A long-running collaboration with Mitch Sanders
Indeed, Different When It’s Silent is approached in a heavy, contemplative hush, but immediately I’m Yours (built on a familiar pop bass, between Faith and Instant Crush) shows that the omnipresent collaboration with Mitch Sanders, who is also from Bristol, will have more than one facet.
The album threads together atmospheres—an inky palette ranging from satin black to stormy gray—and as many successes. The synth textures play a major part, as do guitars with multiple textures, from quintessentially English cold wave to the metallic grunge summoned by Kelela in New Avatar.
One should remember that on the underrated Blowback (2001), whose richness he revisits here, Tricky repurposed Something in the Way: once again, the Bristol kid partly dips his strings and pen into a Cobain-inspired vein. Often pop, tinged with white soul, Mitch Sanders’s falsetto (the pursuit of a voice, a central concern for Tricky) lends coherence to the whole and sheds welcome tonal nuance.
Bleak yet bright and impetuous, Different When It’s Silent is indeed a proper return to form. In the course of a haunted cover of Dope Lemon’s Marinade, of Radana’s hip-hop, or of a blistering primal blues Frontier Town, Adrian Thaws reconnects with density before fading again (“And I fade away…”) at the close of Hengrove Blues. He reemerges at the last moment with a surprisingly well-placed single: the aptly named Out of Place with Marta, a track that transfigures the pain, thus closing this remarkable record that we had almost ceased to hope for.
Different When It’s Silent (False Idols/PIAS). Out July 17.
