Pre-Millennium Tension (1996)

Tricky intended his second album as a departure from the “trip hop” label with which he was not only associated, but indeed tagged as inventor, going back to his work with Massive Attack. His claim was that he wanted to draw closer to punk-rock. I don’t hear much of that here, which maybe lands closer to postpunk as he stalks through welters of spooky sound with his filtered Spiderman vocals. The album bears some of the biggest hits of his career: “Christiansands,” “Tricky Kid” (trite confessions of celebrity by some lights), and the almost wistful “Makes Me Wanna Die.” I don’t think I like Pre-Millenium Tension as much as his first album, Maxinquaye, but it benefits from some spillover effects of that mighty debut. I’m in agreement with rock critic Robert Christgau that key collaborator Martina Topley-Bird tends to get short shrift in the Tricky annals. She’s there on the first four Tricky albums, and then gone, never to return, after their personal relationship ended. Weirdly, Wikipedia offers no songwriting credits for this album, but, according to a Discogs listing, Topley-Bird had no hand in writing any of the songs on Pre-Millennium Tension, and the same is true per Wikipedia for Maxinquaye. But she still has a lot to do with what makes Tricky’s early albums work. Her vocals are a clarion counterpoint to Tricky’s more prowling style, bringing home points of these songs in ways that make them work uniquely. While Tricky rumbles and spews on the lower rungs of the mix in “Christiansands,” for example, Topley-Bird floats in along the higher registers, enlarging the track. And she does that a lot all over the album. I do think Maxinquaye is the better set—the songs are more fully imagined, with the trip hop production that sculpts phantasms into the mix. But I still find enough to like on the follow-up—restrained and understated, it can recede uneasily to the background, reaching out at random with its various hooks and a mood that entirely suffuses any room where it plays, at practically any volume. Lower it, and conversation may still be possible, with lights turned down low. Yet you are never entirely free of it under any circumstances where it plays.