When it comes to things the great British public aren't clamouring for, a new Tricky album ranks somewhere below radiation poisoning and above a new series of ''Orrible'. And yet the albums keep coming, as inevitable and unnecessary as reality TV shows, but more depressing.
The sad thing is that so little faith remains in Tricky's ability to record a record one hundredth as brilliant as his adored debut, 'Maxinquaye', that people have stopped even listening to the music he does make. Thus 2001's 'Blowback' was met with the same yawning weariness from press and public as its predecessors, 'Juxtapose' and 'Angels With Dirty Faces'. A great disservice, because amidst the usual wheezing, doomy nonsense, were a handful of quite wonderful pop songs, his best in years. On 'Excess' he even managed the remarkable achievement of making Alanis Morrissette sing a proper melody and sound good while doing it.
'Vulnerable', however, is very much Tricky business as usual, the sound of a staggering talent laid-up with the longest case of musical flu in history. If this isn't quite creative bankruptcy, it's at least a pretty huge overdraft. Not that 'Vulnerable' is unlistenable. If it was a debut it would show some promise. It's just impossible to believe this can be the same man who crafted songs as perfect as 'Strugglin'', 'Christiansands' or 'Poems'.
Tricky - always a collaborative whore - has hooked-up with a little known singer called Costanza for 'Vulnerable', whose honeyed vocals are tantalisingly reminiscent of 'Maxinquaye''s muse, Martina Topley-Bird. But Tricky never allows her frail voice the room it needs, smearing every track with his asthmatic mutterings, like the mad old man on the bus who just won't be quiet. Opening track, 'Stay', has a slender nursery rhyme charm, but never moves from its shallow rhythmic rut, while 'What Is Wrong' is dreamily pleasant but fundamentally tuneless. Still, these are masterpieces compared to the dire, ugly thrash of 'How High' or the paranoid ramblings of 'Search, Search, Survive'.
A trio of tracks rise out of the anonymity. 'Antimatter' has an aggressive pop thrust and a striking chorus, while 'Car Crash' is hypnotically lovely, largely because Tricky's vocals are absent. And his reinvention of The Cure's 'The Love Cats' into a dubby, husky sex song is a pleasure, demonstrating Tricky's consistent ability to rethink other people's songs and turn them into something new and surprising.
But it's meagre pickings from an artist of this stature and just more evidence that writer's block may be the best career option left to this ex-genius.
