Different Levels Of The Devil’s Company

Tricky “Ponderosa” – Though it’s not exactly rare for couples to collaborate on music together, nearly all of the tracks produced by Tricky featuring Martina Topley-Bird on vocals foreground what would normally be subtext to the point that the sexual tension present in their work seems overwhelming and contagious. Some of this is due to the contrasting character of their voices — Tricky has a thick, creepy rasp that implies a seductive sort of alien otherness, and Martina is elegant, coy, and slightly demure in a way that suggests that she’s an innocent young girl who is slowly being corrupted by his unapologetic decadence. Though Tricky has worked with other female vocalists with a similar vocal range and timbre, none of them can come close to replicating their unique chemistry, or mimicking the subtleties of her phrasing. For example, there’s a dark, flirtatious wit in her performance on “Ponderosa” that twists a song that might otherwise be taken a self-pitying lament about one’s vices into something that underlines the pleasures of self-medication and self-destruction. Her presence on the track opens up the song’s interior monologue just enough to make it a shared experience, shifting its “I” to an exclusive “we” cut off from the outside world.

“Ponderosa” is a perfect early example of one of Tricky’s most common approaches to presenting vocals: As Martina sings a fairly conventional lead part, he shadows and/or anticipates her words with scratchy, rhythmic whispers. There’s a few different ways to interpret this style, and they aren’t the least bit mutually exclusive:

1) He’s placing a spotlight on his role as a svengali type who is putting his words into the mouth of his beautiful, young female protege. In calling attention to this, he is highlighting a sort of artifice or vocal inadequacy that can be perceived as a flaw while also arrogantly making sure that the listener is aware of his authorship.

2) He’s creating a dynamic between the male and female voices that lends a richer subtext to the work. Her vocal part can be understood as an act of submission to his will, but the result is invariably a track in which the female voice sounds confident and fully expressive, and the male voice seems sickly and weak. Tricky plays up his masculinity, but he almost always seems repulsed by it on some level, and so puts himself in the context of a gorgeous female voice in order to both highlight his flaws, and compensate for them. The women in his songs are placed on a pedestal — even when he’s cursing them out, his self-loathing trumps his persecution complex.

3) He’s splitting the song into two interlocking perspectives. Both of the characters are thinking the same thing, and on some level, one is most certainly parroting the other but is either unaware, or simply unsure where they end and the other person begins. (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)

Tricky “Vent” – On Maxinquaye, “Suffocated Love” was a metaphor, but the opening track of Pre-Millenium Tension takes that phrase very, very literally with its lyrics about a woman who hides her lover’s asthma medication as a sadistic ploy to gain the upper hand in their relationship and/or profit from his demise. The song is sung from both perspectives, so the track alternates between Tricky’s paranoid delusion and Martina’s bitter revenge fantasy. The track is dense and claustrophobic, with its smothering beats implying the couple’s stifling proximity to one another, and its anguished, heavily distorted guitar noise standing in for Tricky’s muted screams. It’s worth noting that the song inverts the usual Tricky formula, and Martina speaks her words just before singing them, as though to clarify that she’s taking full credit for her actions. The result is very chilling, but also sexy in a very intense and unnerving sort of way. (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)

Elsewhere: My new Hit Refresh column is up on the ASAP site with mp3s from Michael Dracula, Tiny Vipers, and Edie Sedgwick.

Also: There’s a wonderful video feature about the Fiery Furnaces on NewMusicBox that places the band in the context of “new music” as opposed to indie rock.