Album of the week: Tricky

TRICKY: KNOWLE WEST BOY

***

DOMINO, £10.99

IT HAS been five years since Tricky's last album, Vulnerable, and a good few more since the brooding Bristolian created anything worth turning up the volume for. Thirteen years after it was released, his influential debut album Maxinquaye still casts a shadow over the rest of his catalogue. In the interim, Mike Skinner has stepped in and taken over the reins to some extent by pushing urban paranoia in a more mainstream, geezer-friendly direction with The Streets, while MIA has taken care of the left-field eclecticism. Even his trip-hop contemporaries Portishead have finally returned with a new spin on the sound they spawned.

The former Tricky Kid, meanwhile, has taken some time out from music, living anonymously in New York and then living it up in LA long enough to get him harking back to his own ghetto war stories from his adolescence on a Bristol council estate. Knowle West Boy is littered with autobiographical references, starting with the title, which namechecks the area he grew up in. This could be an effort to remind himself of his roots when he is far from home. Or maybe he is just at that nostalgic age – 40 – when he feels it is time to reclaim the musical influences which shaped him. As he says: "Coldplay's all very well, but it all gets a bit whiny. I wanted lyrics like The Specials and Blondie and Banshees songs I loved as a kid."

The results are mixed, with some trademark Tricky sounds and some less successful forays into newer territory. There is considerable diversity on Knowle West Boy, not just in terms of musical style but also in personnel. Rather than rely on just one female sidekick as he has done in the past, most effectively with Martina Topley-Bird, he has drafted in a number of vocal foils, all of them virtual unknowns.

The album begins confidently enough with the tinkle of a jazzy piano, a gruff croon and a hectoring moll in the background. Puppy Toy then opens out into a big, ballsy Britnoir blues number sung by Alex Mills, a singer signed to Tricky's Brown Punk label.

Joseph and Veronica are tracks named after their singers, the former a delicate but atmospheric chill-out piece featuring an elusive LA busker and the latter a minimal Sly & Robbie-style slab of hypnotic, industrial funk which wouldn't sound out of place in Portishead's current set.

Bacative and Baligaga are both rooted in dancehall reggae, the latter fused with something shiftier, courtesy of a wispy vocal mantra from an unknown Spanish singer. Coalition is a brooding, distracted rap. The backing track boasts some haunting strings, but lyrically it's a rather clichéd Gil Scott-Heron-referencing expression of Tricky's disaffection with consumer society: "get your happy meal in your happy car, you can make more money but still here you are" he intones, before turning his frustration inwards, berating himself with "how can I be surrounded by people and still be lonely?"

The more extrovert tracks have a certain throwaway appeal, though the catchy, industrial electro pop of C'Mon Baby is no more than the sum of its hooks, falling back on the empty rock'n'roll posturing that Primal Scream have turned into an art form. Current autobiographical single Council Estate is similarly energised, driven along by a funky road movie backing, but lacks an overall authenticity. Also, for a song that Tricky claims is all him, it doesn't actually yield much.

He fares better when he drops the Tricky-from-the-block act and opens up some personal yet universal truths. Past Mistake is very typically Tricky. This dramatic trip-hop torch song, sung by his ex-girlfriend, actually prefigured their break-up with its relationship downer subject matter. Its sound is reminiscent of the wispy sultriness often heard on Kylie albums, so it shouldn't be that much of a surprise to hear Tricky's cover of Minogue's Slow. He gives it a gnarly, rocky makeover, but it's no match for his expert reworking of the Public Enemy track Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos which stands as a benchmark.

Overall, it's a patchy return but at least not one which is content to offer the same awkward, furrowed-brow introversion and morose soundtrack all over again. There is great potential in the album's closing track, School Gates, which weaves the memory of his girlfriend falling pregnant at 16 into a spindly urban folk blues, and manages to tick the same boxes as Isobel Campbell's effortlessly evocative work with Mark Lanegan. Only here does he successfully combine credibility with artistry.