The frustrating thing about being a Tricky fan is that he's a guy who knows damn well where his talents lie, and yet he chooses to ignore them. The list of things Tricky does poorly (rock, house, singer-songwriter pop, ska, disco, etc.) is much longer than the list of things he does well (which basically amounts to the sound he invented and perfected on the music he released between 1995 and 1999). For 10 years, he's refused to accept that an inimitable style can be a strength as much a limitation, a foundation to build from rather than something to reject as predictable. His music's suffered horribly thanks to many, many failed attempts to show off a versatility that just isn't there.
At the beginning of the 21st century, Tricky decided to ditch his dank, anxiety-ridden, and reputation-making brand of UK hip-hop. Critics had been carping that he'd devolved to pastiching himself on records like 1998's Angels With Dirty Faces. Fans wondered if his relentlessly bleak sound had anywhere left to go. Stretching the formula might not have been such a bad idea. Unfortunately Tricky's reinvention was a little more scorched-earth than anyone expected. On 2001's execrable Blowback and 2003's ever-so-slightly-less-awful Vulnerable, he flipped both middle fingers at his audience while running straight into the worst music of his career, a sad stew of lazily executed alt-rock and dance-pop clichés. Tricky had often been blasted for having a one-note sound, but these failed attempts at schizoid genre-mixing proved that at least he'd really believed in that one note.
On 2008's Knowle West Boy and the new Mixed Race, the two tentative comeback albums he's released since the Blowback/Vulnerable fiasco, the standout tracks continue to look back to Tricky's bleaker (and better) 90s records. His music sounds as visceral and committed as ever when he's working with materials he's mastered: hip-hop, dub, urban dread. And a few Mixed Race tracks do give up the goods: The ravaged voice that sounds both sexy and sinister; the oppressive atmosphere he can still conjure effortlessly; the way his slow, bleary rapping meshes so beautifully with low-key female vocalists. On opener "Every Day", he adds a new and blessedly subtle country blues vibe, and it suggests that, hey, maybe he really can expand his music without totally ditching what makes it special.
But no, he'd still rather try his hand at spacey Kompakt-esque techno-disco ("Really Real") or Middle Eastern music ("Hakim"), even though the evidence suggests he's got very little feel for either. And those are the album's more successful stabs at style hopping. There's also the anemic riff on Daft Punk ("Kingston Logic") and the lifeless hip-house track he flogs with a big cheesy hunk of Henry Mancini's "Peter Gunn Theme" ("Murder Weapon"). True, these missteps aren't as embarrassing as the ones on Blowback or Vulnerable. For one thing, there's no Alanis Morissette collaboration, and Tricky seems to have at least accepted that his music only works when he goes for darkness, eeriness, creepiness, whatever. But his attempts at rock or club music invariably have the touchy-feely quality of a dabbler who's moved out of his comfort zone but lacks the craft or confidence to pull it off. At this point, he's released enough terrible-to-mediocre records that releasing a strong ten-track album in the vein of his old stuff wouldn't be blasted as backpedaling. It'd be hailed as a return to form from the long-suffering. Until he realizes that, we'll continue to get albums like Mixed Race: Mostly a failure, but with enough glimmers of a true comeback to tease fans into checking out the next one.
