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Product Details:
Audio CD Release Date:
September 09, 2008
Studio:
Domino
Number Of Discs:
1
Average Customer Rating:
based on 9 reviews
Description:
Tricky is back with an album named after the Bristol neighborhood where he grew up. It details the travels and travails of his youth, resulting in an eclectic aural history of his diverse upbringing. He reaches into post-punk, Two-Tone, reggae, hip-hop, and pop, twisting them into surreal songscapes. Tricky uses his astonishingly eclectic band and a host of great undiscovered singers to create the most varied and accessible set of his career.
Track Listing:
1.
Puppy Toy
2.
Bacative
3.
Joseph
4.
Veronika
5.
C'Mon Baby
6.
Council Estate
7.
Past Mistake
8.
Coalition
9.
Cross to Bear
10.
Slow
11.
Baligaga
12.
Far Away
13.
School Gates
Customer Reviews:
Average Customer Review:
Write an online review and share your thoughts with other customers.
tricks and treatsDec 13, 2008 This is a spectacular work of power and depth that re-defines this genre of music. His songs are stimulating, thought-provoking, and mood-enhancing to the highest degrees. The deft combination of angelic, hypnotic vocals with his darkly interesting voice bring depth and imagination to the music. Your mind is spirited to far away lands of vivid imagery and intense moods. This is transportive music to be treasured endlessly.
one of tricky's bestNov 09, 2008 this album is good for a tricky album. if your into the evolution of tricky, you will like this one. allot different than the old stuff but still on the same feel. if your into taking long walks, this album is good for that.
2 of 5 found the following review helpful:
The end of the longest drought in musical historySep 27, 2008 Great early work with Massive Attack was followed by Maxinquaye easily one of the top ten releases of the 90's and then nothing. Oh there was a cut here and there that teased at the genius of his early work, but nothing consistent. Well folks, the drought is over. This may be even better than Maxinquaye. I won't rush to judgement on that issue until I hear this disc a few hundred more times, but I am just happy that he still has it in him. My favorite cut opens the disc, Puppy Love. I cannot get it outta my head a mix of a smoky piano lounge sound, some violin and the Tricky hip hop signature whisper. It segues into the wonderful Bacative and the disc never lets up except for one throwaway track that sounds more like some of his weaker experimental stuff, Coalition. As usual he fills the disc with lots of unknown talent and he emerges triumphant with the best trip-hop disc in over a decade.
3 of 5 found the following review helpful:
mixed bag: some Nearly God, some just OKSep 17, 2008 Many tracks are reminiscent of Nearly God, which I thought was terrific albeit not as good as Maxinquaye. Best two tracks are, by far, Veronika and Past Mistake. Those two tracks are alone worth the price. Others are as uneven as Pre-Millenium Tension. His experiments with rock guitar are where this album hits and misses: Puppy Toy is pretty great. Council Estate has very nice parts to it although it could be more coherent. Ultimately, this album would be much better reduced to eleven tracks, minus C'mon Baby and Slow.
9 of 12 found the following review helpful:
Tricky is back in the music gameSep 13, 2008 I heard the songs and I immediately knew--the oddly phrased piano lick in "Puppy Toy", the resurgent aggression of "C'mon Baby", the drivingly exotic groove of "Baligaga", the moving real-time elegy of "Joseph"--Tricky, whom I have come to love for the genius of his early work and his career-spanning sense of ear-catching sounds, has returned! After what started to seem like a death knell with the release of the stale albums Blowback and Vulnerable, Tricky has returned to the music world sounding 100% fresh and ready to take a whole new audience by storm. Now, though, he's turned his old mistakes into new disciplines, and that's what makes Knowle West Boy superb.
How Knowle West Boy really wins my favor is that it combines both new (rock and dance) and old (trip hop, hip hop, and ambient) elements of Tricky's repertoire into something greater, making the album very much an opus. While it is not so hazy as Maxinquaye or Nearly God, it exudes the same offbeat catchiness of those early works. Many hooks and ideas that might have belonged to Blowback or Vulnerable also appear here, but in the context of the vastly improved songwriting they sound completely different. In the song "Joseph" I especially grow nostalgic, hearing so much of a resemblance to the sorrowfully introspective stuff of Tricky's early years--and yet this new track does not lose any credibility for being so much better produced than in the past, a problem that plagued Tricky just a two albums ago.
To his credit, Knowle West Boy draws on many elements that Tricky has not had success with before and expands on those he has. Most prominent here is the more electrified rock-driven sound he tried to pick up at the beginning of the New Millennium. Amazingly, that electro-rock sound works here--songs like "Slow" and "Far Away" breathe and invite the listener, instead of making them feeling trapped in a static field. Ideas reminding of Goldfrapp and Gorillaz have crept in and reveal a renewed sense of Tricky's intimacy with modern music as a writer and a producer. In place of the repetitive and over-produced sounds of Blowback and Vulnerable, these pieces feel as fresh and thoughtful as Tricky's older, more mellow material, in spite of being divergent in style and sound. This is the album's greatest accomplishment and something that Tricky should be very proud of--that he has evolved as an artist and succeeded in that evolution (after several years of trying).
I can't say enough how well Tricky's combination of music and lyrics can capture what superficially might be a ghetto memoir or a drug-induced phantasm and make it feel like an existential treatise that applies to everyone. I am reminded in places of songs like "Peyote Sings" and "Lyrics of Fury" and yet the overall album never lulls into the dreamy sleep that made his early recordings work. Aforementioned songs like "Baligaga" (with its thwacking bass, in-and-out drum layering, and sweltering saxophone) and "Joseph" (subtley percussive beneath a layer of amniotic dreaming) have just enough wailing, anguished siren song in the back of their off-kilter grooves to invite a lot of comparison to Tricky's early 90's ability to put one into a different state of mind.
I feel like we finally have our prophet of Bristol sound back after years in the wilderness. Clearly, however, he has moved on to a new sound altogether--he brings to us new commandments, but they bear the same strange and wonderful news as before. Knowle West Boy is arguably Tricky's most successful forward leap in his entire career, moving beyond Bristol sound and yet maintaining his message and his credibility. The album brings renewed hope that there is still a lot of promise left in the Tricky Kid.
based on 9 reviews
