Tricky: Fall To Pieces | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- How did the guy who came up turning out impossibly British rap couplets like “don’t wanna be on top of your list, monopoly and properly kissed” and “touch you like cocoa” with Massive Attack become an era-defining musician and personality?

Not solely a formative member of Bristol’s finest, but someone who‘s debut solo work launched a half a dozen more careers: Martina Topley Bird, the Baby Namboos, the Nearly God project, collabs with Bjork. Hell, the world even paid attention to one of his cousins doing a Bob Marley cover for a minute there, so powerful was the gravity well around this artist.

However, somehow he also instantly became the posterchild for mental health in the music biz, his blisteringly personal accounts of drug excess, the paranoia that dripped from his woozy, dysphoric production style, the way he could talk about his record deals acquiring meaning as they helped feed his family, but also the disorienting unreality of the world he was falling into, the image and the fantasy of trip-hop: darkness and depression, bad weather, the criminal world always a half-step behind you, poverty and irrelevance and being forgotten always snapping at your heels.

Whatever else has come to pass, we haven’t been able to forget Tricky. He turned himself into an emblem of the moment in music he came from, then kept going. The image of an unassuming guy in a hoodie hunched over his phone at the back of the bus. Only it’s not a phone, it’s a Yamaha pocket sequencer, and he’s writing a tune that will buy and sell the bus he’s on several times over.

Falling To Pieces opens up with some Stranger Things FM-synth vibes, the Oberheim’s cold solidity underscoring a classically understated near-whisper vocal from MTB. Some extremely subtle undercurrent of synthpads and textural samples skitter in and then disappear just as quickly. This is not the hyper-dense spectrum overload of his early work, but a continuation of a process of stripping down, elements more raw and exposed, less wash and clutter to distract from the vulnerability.

Tricky seems to have a new interest in brevity too: perhaps a method for creating solitude of voice, isolating the idea inside the smallest capsule possible. The first three tracks barely average two minutes long.

Things pick up after the triple interlude intro. There are notes of brighter Brixton rhythms on In the Doorway and there’s a hint of the kind of audacious programming that makes Tricky distinct here too: that bassline that strikes you first as too jumpy, almost immature, too brash, and then slowly spirals into an obviously genius choice.

Hate This Pain finds us back in classic Tricky territory, emphysema-gravel drawl doubled with whispers, a broken blues piano riff, a drone and almost zero drums, all waiting to inevitably give way to MTB’s disinterested lilt. That first cigarette with milky tea and drizzle at six AM.

Chills Me To the Bone is positively lively by comparison, an industrial jungle bassline that somehow got lost in an r'n'b club. Fall Please ratchets things up into four-four, a dub-house minimal work-out doubling as a dare to the new-skool UK garage kids. Could they remix something this deep?

Yeah, Tricky is back, but if you took away Martina Topley-Bird there’d be almost nothing there. Together these two defined a whole era, a sound that they made look so simple it spawned a million imitations. but Fall To Pieces shows they’ve been able to peel back even more outside layers, exposing the core interiority of their style even further. In a wild time these two are charting their own through-line of the unique terrain that is twenty-first-century UK electronic music, confirming they still connect with the central questions of urbanity, isolation, mental health, and class struggle, whilst maintaining the influence of Indo-Caribbean rhythms, Afro-American blues tones, '80’s sampler techniques and nihilist lyrical ennui.

It’s amazing that after twenty-ish years, Tricky and co. can sound so distinctively like themselves and still extend the aesthetic. Stripped, bluesy, grim, propulsively rhythmic, moody, the essence of the morning after. I see a whole new generation of fans tiptoeing over the sleeping bodies from last night’s party to put on this album; and with a newfound ability to make a full statement in a brief window (the longest track here doesn’t break 3:30) just like last night’s party this album is over before you know it, leaving hazy memories of things being weird, raw, dark; fragmentary images of someone slow-grinding as smoke curls in low light.

- Kieran Ruffles.
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