September 5th, 2008 4:41am

Remember, Boy, You’re A Superstar

Tricky @ Irving Plaza 9/4/2008

The Love Cats / Past Mistakes / Black Steel / Puppy Toy / Pumpkin / Council Estate / Veronika / Lyrics of Fury / Bacative / Dear God / Girls / Overcome / You Don’t Wanna // Vent / Joseph

Tricky “Council Estate” – Gah, what a weird, unsatisfying show. It was not without its pleasures — I was pretty happy with the performances of “Council Estate,” “Puppy Toy,” and “Veronika,” and it was nice enough to hear the selections from the first two albums — but for the most part, the concert dragged, and Tricky primarily played up his worst impulses. Most egregiously, a third of the songs were extended into interminable dirges that followed the same trajectory: main song body….lull….intense part….lull….intense part…..lull….intense part…lull…intense part…lull…outro. That actually may be cutting it short for “Joseph,” a number that overstays its welcome at about 3 minutes on Knowle West Boy, but kept going for what seemed like twenty eternities in the encore. I knew coming into this show that Tricky loves his shouty yet atmospheric dirges, and I’ve seen him perform similar things the last time I saw him in concert about ten years ago, but much of this show sank into dismal self-parody.

Strangely, almost all of the older numbers in the setlist were covers, or songs that either interpolate or quote well-known tracks by other artists. This seems like a deliberate move on his part; perhaps it is a way of playing familiar album cuts without having to confront much of his own writing, nearly all of which comes across as extremely personal, and the best of it is tied in with his former partner Martina Topley-Bird. The only number in the set that relied on the old Martina/Tricky tension was “Vent,” and though I was glad to hear it, the performance simply did not have any of the sexual and emotional terror that makes the album recording so incredibly compelling. (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)