Your Fruit Is Slightly Bruised

Tricky “Puppy Toy” – I’m on Tricky’s side, and I always have been, but he doesn’t make it easy. (Indeed, it is very tricky to be a Tricky fan.) Since the late ’90s, he’s spend most of his time either distancing himself from the sound of his best-loved work, or trying in vain to reconnect with the inspiration that yielded Maxinquaye and Pre-Millenium Tension. Though it’s unlikely that he’ll ever make another classic album, it’s important to note that he is still capable of producing good work. Every Tricky record has at least one great song on it — for example, I highly recommend “For Real” from the otherwise dire Juxtapose — and for some reason, he’s intentionally relegated a number of strong tracks to total obscurity. He’s a perverse guy, and because of that, I don’t trust his judgment at all.

Knowle West Boy, his first album in five years, is probably his best album since Angels With Dirty Faces, but it’s still a mess. A solid third of the record is tainted by his consistently terrible taste in male vocalists; another third of it is kinda formulaic and neither here nor there. The successful tracks are the most dynamic– his solo “rap” turn on “Council Estate;” his twisted approximation of new wave pop on “Far Away;” the feminine aggression of “Veronika” and “Puppy Toy.” Though Tricky is clearly still trying to find the perfect Martina Topley-Bird soundalike, the vocalists on the latter two tracks do well to avoid the sleepiness of previous faux-Martinas, and play up the tone of sassy defiance that made Topley-Bird so compelling in the first place.

“Puppy Toy” actually comes closer to sounding like “Together Now,” Tricky’s collaboration with Neneh Cherry on the Nearly God record, than anything he ever made with Martina. The song applies the soft-loud-soft dynamics of ’90s alt-rock to a song that alternates between skewed lounge jazz and rock n’ roll cabaret. It’s a bold, bombastic number that contrasts some fine sonic detail — layers of humming electric guitar, fluid acoustic bass, a string arrangement — with a huge chorus that tramples everything in its path. (Click here to buy it from Domino Records.)