Christiansands. Tricky. 1996. Island.

 Released twenty eight years ago, Christiansands still hisses with visionary acuity in its account of the fluid interchangeability of identity around the time that social destabilization became a norm. Using whispered intimacy as the subcultural voice of the coming rampant pathologies—incel active shooter, suicide jihadist, cartel drug mule—Tricky sets a furtively disquieting mood to play upon his contemporary listenership’s heightened awareness of emotional  manipulation and compartmentalism. Christiansands is one of those epochal recordings like Sign O’ the Times or Nirvana’s Polly that isolates with chilling accuracy the tipping point at which violence segregates its desperate antagonist from the relative anonymous security of the common human milieu before turning his virulent ire on an unsuspecting public. Starting with a boy-meets-girl metaphor—the girl sung by the incomparable Martina Topley-Bird—the record deliberately paces itself to give the listener enough space to accommodate himself to the textural strangeness of Tricky’s voice, and how wholly apposite to Christiansands’ themes of dissemblance and intransigence its saturnine originality really is. Immersion in the disequilibrium of one’s age can lead to an internalization of its most fraught tensions, and Tricky documents the ills and crimes of our world with the weirdly calm assurance of a new Virgil touring the Nine Circles, the tour de force of Christiansands’ closing lyric suggesting he is both subterranean guide and poet. Set in the near past, his music still sounds like an agency of future prophecies. 

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