It's tempting to assume that Tricky made this record after discovering that he suffers from Candida, the dietary illness that has apparently been responsible for his often bleak, paranoid outlook over recent years. Follow that logic and you could account for the fact that this is indeed his most accessible album since 'Maxinquaye'. But, apparently, that isn't the case - the majority of 'Blowback' was written at least three years ago.
We ought to know by now that this is not a musical mind so easily explained. Again, he does much to confound us: on the one hand putting together some of the most emotionally complex yet resolutely experimental music of his career whilst on the other he's misguided enough to record the Wonder Woman theme with the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Oh yeah - if you didn't already know - Alanis Morrisette, Cyndi Lauper and Live's Ed Kowalczyk also turn up on 'Blowback'.
That's not necessarily why the album is being hailed as a "return to form", after all the same was said of his last, 'Juxtapose', and the guests on that project were decidedly low-key. It's more the simple fact that, after a couple of albums so claustrophobically taut that they were almost panic attack inducing in their intensity, there's some space in this release. Tricky put it best himself on 'Pre-Millennium Tension's 'Vent' when he rasped, "I can hardly breathe." He was the one stealing the listener's Ventalin.
Often, 'Blowback' sounds like the logical follow-up to 'Angels With Dirty Faces' exploring difficult personal themes - Tricky spitting therapy with the repetitious frenzy of the shaman - and mired in the thick psychic sludge of his work at the production desk. Elsewhere it sounds like the label sneaked the celebrity musicians into the studio while he was sleeping, played them the strange incantations that their difficult charge had committed to tape and asked them to make sense of them with their bloody guitars.
Nowhere is this more apparent than on another collaboration with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, 'Girls', on which Tricky seems to be singing (?) at complete cross-purposes with Frusciante and Kedis. Whilst he babbles and roars, "never seen my Dad boy" at some imaginary listener ("F**k the biological / I don't need no man / I don't care") the Chilis seem to be trying to turn the track into a 'California Girls' for 2000 ("shake it for me baby / let me step into your trousers").
The guests that really matter are the ones that didn't get the fat cheques: Ambersunshower and Hawkman, the latter proving a revelation, delivering his chilling apocalyptic ragga verses throughout. If the list of contributors had been kept to these two 'Blowback' might have been the 'Maxinquaye' part two that everyone, including Tricky, seems so desperate for.
'Give It To Them', 'Bury The Evidence' and 'Evolution Revolution Love' become entrancing as the looped intensity of Tricky's production finds Hawkman's pitch and merges into an utterly possessing whole. The emotionally disconcerting delivery of Amersunshower - never sounding impassioned yet never seeming completely dislocated - provides all the ambiguity and complexity that Tricky's music demands.
This may well be Tricky's best album since the mighty 'Pre-Millennium Tension' but not because 'he's been poorly and now he's better' and certainly not thanks to the celebrity contributors - the best they can do for him is help this sell and give him the chance to make another. It's because, when he's left to his own devices, he appears to be on firing form, creating music that sits happily between the frenzied aggro mantras of his darkest days and the beautifully evocative wonder of his debut.
