I wouldn't blame Tricky if he was sick of hearing about the 1990s. It's the decade where he set up his presence, released his defining works, and then noisily tried to escape. That he spent the last dozen years of his career stumbling into the kind of modern rock/indie pop territory that didn't mesh well with his early aesthetic says something about how definitive (and potentially imprisoning) his fame-making sound was. Whether or not his genre-hopping would've worked out on its own terms-- and for the most part, it hasn't-- it'd have a hard time maintaining the moody, seductive yet stressed pull of his first few albums. But Tricky wasn't wrong to try shaking his trip-hop rep and attempt new things, he just sounded so adrift that it was hard to figure out where he'd find his way back to once he finally refocused. By the time he released Mixed Race in 2010, it became clear that the best-case scenario where Tricky was concerned was to either wait for some new thing to finally click, or hope that he looks back just long enough to be reinvigorated by memories of where he started.
False Idols tries to split the difference, and weirdly enough, it nearly succeeds. Calling it Maxinquaye for the middle-aged seems a bit too glib, but this album really does return to the ethereal, almost fragile intensity that marked his well-loved 1995 debut with the more solemn perspective of a grown man who's felt like he's lost his way. And for a while, everything seems right. The production's appropriately spare, moody, and elegant, streamlined and engineered to sound uniquely his while still throwing alternate jabs and nods to contemporary R&B's underacknowledged debt to his sound. But it's still far from monochromatic; the subdued yet rich minimal house thump of “Bonnie & Clyde” and the dirgy guitar squall of Antlers collaboration/cover/semi-rewrite “Parenthesis” are integrated variations on the stylistic theme, not whiplash detours. That sustained mood benefits greatly from his harmonizing and interjections with singer Francesca Belmonte, filling Martina Topley-Bird's role as the quietly assured yet emotionally driven foil to Tricky's clenched, whispery murmur, like two introverts trapped in close quarters. Going into a Tricky album hoping for that pull between beauty and tension is going to leave you at least somewhat happy with this record.
But the catch-22 of “return to form” albums is that without the dregs that precede them, they need to stand up as something deeper, something without ghosts following it around. And even if False Idols is approaching a more coherent idea of what a Tricky album could sound like in 2013, a lot of the record comes off more like a tentative first step. There's no overthinking here, which is a relief after all the tryhard high-concept ideas-- poppy hip-house, French Touch knockoffs, leering cock-rock-- that didn't really take off on his last couple of records. But with that simplified approach comes simplified songs: Only the gel-submerged minimalist funk of “Tribal Drums” barely scrapes past the three-and-a-half-minute mark, and even the more immediately catchy tracks start to sound like sketches on further investigation. It's most evident in the songwriting: Opener “Somebody's Sins” is simply a cover of Patti Smith's opening verses to her cover of “Gloria”; “Nothing's Changed” features a generous interpolation of Pre-Millennium Tension highlight “Makes Me Wanna Die”, and too many songs lean on simplistic metaphors and imagery that merely hint at deeper things they leave frustratingly concealed: the vague romantic overtones of “Valentine”; disjointed debauchery on “Is That Your Life”, the evasive “Passion of the Christ”.
And yet in the end it does show promise: the songs aren't bad by any stretch, and when the first negative that comes to mind is that the ideas need to be fleshed out a bit, it's a long way from wishing they'd've been discarded in the first place. Even with 15 tracks all averaging around the three-minute mark, there's little time on False Idols devoted to offbeat goofs or weird failed experiments, just a handful of songs that bottom out at “not bad but a bit forgettable.” A front-to-back listen won't dredge up any obvious duds or collar-grabbing highlights, but it might get this album's focused vision planted a bit deeper in your head. Tricky might not have succeeded in bringing his old sound 100% back to life, but as an effort to hit the reset button and rediscover himself, this record's a better-than-expected surprise.
