With every Jamie Treays album, the same feelings: I’ve heard something like this before; this one’s a bit overwhelming; I have no idea what he’s on about; what is that weird sound?; why can’t he sing properly?; did he really just say that?; I don’t mind the singing on this one; I quite like that weird sound; this bit is pretty good; I’ve never heard anything like that before.
With each release, though, the singer-rapper-guitarist-producer-songwriter grows more impressive. His last, Carry on the Grudge, had some good songs but was a touch tidy and conventional, a step away from the junkyard rap-pop pioneered on his first two albums. Trick takes a little from all three and re-establishes Jamie T as a one-man genre, even when he’s paying loud homage to influences such as the Clash and Blur.
Some will mourn the disappearance of London as a backdrop, and there are fewer slang-stuffed tales of after-hours drinking and drugging. But Treays’s demotic-poetic rap verses resurface, all allusion, alliteration and internal rhyming, pulling language into unpredictable shapes. As always, he has song-title characters, now more mythic and historical than previously. No more Sheila, Peter, Ike and Tina; instead we get Joan of Arc, Robin Hood and 17th-century Cassandra of London Solomon Eagle, as Treays aims for ambitious, state-of-the-nation themes with the usual dose of self-laceration.
It doesn’t always work – he’s said he constructs verses in couplets rather than structure the entire lyric, which hobbles some songs. The best tune, Power Over Men, is a beautifully jaunty crooner slightly betrayed by its words. If you’re feeling generous, it’s a lovelorn lament, but it runs the risk of sourly reducing a woman to her attractiveness to men, then suggests that this “gift” is cursed anyway as “she can never really kiss/ ’cause there’s never a risk”.
It’s quite a trick that the album doesn’t feel as oppressive as it should. There are several references to suicide, with one chorus warning: “If I had a gun, I would blow my brains out.” Lead single, the urgent, brooding Tinfoil Boy, uses broad but brutal strokes to suggest a drug user slowly sliding from view, and arena-friendly new-wave chugger Tescoland is a mildly satirical celebration of parochialism. Police Tapes ends with Treays viciously spitting: “I never felt so low” repeatedly over a meaty hunk of PiL-ish metallic dub-rock.
Yet Trick feels more celebratory than melancholy, mostly because of the bruising passion and commitment Treays loads into every syllable, every bar. It’s only the closing song, Self Esteem, where the confidence runs dry and he opens up a vein of vulnerability. It’s desperately sad and beautiful, a little bloom finally poking through the concrete.
