As the story goes, Tricky discovered Martina Topley-Bird as a teenager, when he spotted the truant schoolkid smoking cigarettes in front of his Bristol home. Their conversations quickly turned to collaboration, and within a few years time, Topley-Bird was not only the sweetly vocal foil to the blunted chaos of Tricky's still superb Maxinquaye, she was the mother of his daughter. As the pair's romantic relationship and creative synergy disintegrated over the ensuing years, the release of her own solo record seemed inevitable. And yet, even as Bristol's trip-hop gave way to Morcheeba's slip-slop, Topley-Bird remained out of the picture.
So how odd that she would return in 2003, eight years removed from Maxinquaye, with a record that mostly sounds, well, four years too late. Quixotic is a lot of things, but, in engaging in exactly the kind of non-committal genre-hopping and saccharine candy-kissing that practically defined post-Bristol also-rans like Mono, Hooverphonic and Morcheeba, it's mostly just dated.
Topley-Bird's eagerness to distance herself from the billowing dope smoke of those early Tricky benchmarks is evident within Quixotic's first two minutes. We're eased in via "Intro"-- a swinging a cappella track that's more O Brother than Pre-Millennium-- before Josh Homme and Mark Lanegan show up to draw some lumbering stoner guitar shapes on the diluted rock exercise "Need One". With its clumsy riffola and arrhythmic overproduction, "Need One" conjures up the precise strain of the Hollywood rock/electronica hybrid that was perfect for end credits in movies about things like cyberpunks and stolen identities, but nowhere else.
The Morcheeba similarities rear their head again on "Anything", a supple acoustic ballad that gives way to a jumble of slide guitars, quivering synth bits and widescreen beats before collapsing in a hush of polite reverb. With its shadowy melody and lovely key change, "Anything" is by no stretch a terrible song, but it's difficult to listen to without feeling like you've heard it before. "Soul Food", with its warm Rhodes keyboards, library music string pieces and old soul accoutrements, is arguably even more derivative, yet thanks to its rolling arrangements and Topley-Bird's gloriously unhurried delivery, it's handily the album's standout track.
Things get patchier from here on out. The bluesy, emaciated drone of "Lullaby", the awful space-rock whoosh of "I Still Feel", and the frankly inexplicable punk thrash of "I Wanna Be There" all seem to exist as afterthoughts. There are other highlights, mainly in the form of the shuddering drum workout of "Ragga" and the tousled Sunday morning sway of "Lying", but even those feel like small victories in the context of this disappointing aesthetic misfire.
As ever, Topley-Bird's voice continues to be a strange and beautiful thing, but it's admittedly less strange and less beautiful when framed against this hopelessly warmed over setting. Although I can't quite figure out what she could've done to produce the distance and the renewal she so obviously requires, I remain fairly certain that making Even Bigger Calm is probably not the way out. Of Bristol, a typecasting quandary, or anywhere.
