Tricky’s vocals are more to the fore on Skilled Mechanics, a collaborative side-project with long-time collaborators DJ Milo and Luke Harris, than on much of his solo work. His voice is a mumble, sometimes a mere whisper – and when it’s double-tracked, as on Here My Dear, it’s often unintelligible. When he is audible, as on Hero, his rhymes can be less than illuminating: “She’s a no-no / Wants Perry Como / She’s kinda sour like a power like Bono.” Tricky’s troubled childhood – his father’s negligence, his mother’s suicide – is recounted in harrowing detail on Boy, but in the next breath he’s telling us about his asthma and his struggles to get a record deal, giving equal weight to personal tragedies and more mundane challenges. Despite these mis-hits, Skilled Mechanics seethes with low-level, lo-fi menace, its spare instrumentation creating an unsettling queasiness that will have been familiar to Tricky’s admirers since 1995’s Maxinquaye. In particular, Unreal, featuring guest vocalist Xdare, has a David Lynchian chill.
