Tricky continues to take his own brave, if lonely path, on latest album Fall to Pieces, his fourteenth in all, just out. In some ways his whole career has been a wilful retreat into darkness following his brief moment in the commercial spotlight with debut album Maxinquaye.
That record established the basic, defining characteristics of Tricky's sensibility and sound. Blunt, minimal but inventive missives from a deeply bleak, troubled, paranoid space. Fall to Pieces makes no real departures from this recipe but is well worth a listen anyhow.
Tricky knows that he works best working off a female foil and that feature is foregrounded again here. Mostly this involves Marta Zlakowska who he met in a Krakow bar looking for a replacement for a singer who had dropped out on tour. The two work together like a dream. Even if it's an unmistakably disturbed and troubled one.
Fall to Pieces comes from the bleakest possible point of origin. The death of Tricky's baby daughter Mazy 2019. This is an album that pulls no punches in terms of its raw, grim pain. Tricky is to be commended for crafting such determined art from such traumatic loss. It's a very good record.
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