Divergent Evolution: 'Blowback' and 'Vespertine'

Tricky and Björk shared beginnings early on in their respective careers on the Nearly God album after both of them had released phenomenally popular debut albums that redefined the way people listened to electronic music. Tricky’s seminal album, Maxinquaye has a sound so original that critics invented the genre “triphop” in an attempt to contain it, while Björk’s first two albums, Debut and Post had already established her as the new queen of dance music, with numerous hit singles and co-authorship of the title song on Madonna’s Bedtime Stories. Nearly God avoided the expectations of critics in the wake of their successful first albums, and its sparse, minimalist, lonely melodies succeeded admirably.

Björk and Tricky’s paths diverged dramatically after that—Tricky continued to remix Björk’s songs, but soon wound up in a fightfist with her fiancee Goldie, later to disappear into the obscurity of what has since been diagnosed as a rare hormone disease. He released albums that were proogressively more radio-unfriendly, while Björk released the acclaimed Homogenic, and became so famous that she was the victim of fan attacks and stalkers. Björk then starred in last year’s Dancer in the Dark, directed by Lars von Trier, for which she was awarded Best Actress while the film won Palm D’Or at the Cannes Film festival, though she has since sworn never to make a film again.

This year sees both artists release what are possibly their finest albums ever. With Blowback, Tricky, recovered from his hormone disease, has released the album he has apparently avoided making since Maxinquaye. His latest is an instant classic that puts his previous few albums in the context they deserve, proving that all of Tricky’s experiments and claustrophobic introspection were deliberate choices, not the leavings of an artist who has lost his way. Interestingly, he has adopted a low profile on his own album, while reaping the benefits of a bizarre and fantastic series of collaborations, from various elements of the Red Hot Chili Peppers (check out Anthony Kiedis on the out-and-out rocker “Girls,” where Tricky puts Prodigy in their place, sneering, “I’m not a firestarter, ‘cause I’m a little smarter”), Alanis Morissette, Ed Kowalczyk of Live, and, perhaps most bizarrely, Cyndi Lauper on “Five Days” (remember “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”?) Tricky is completely unrepentant about the commercially appealing nature of the album: Blowback is Tricky’s re-introduction to MTV after conquering his demons. He has found himself a rock solid band, including alterna-soul singer Ambersunshower, whose keening “You Don’t Want To” takes the riff at the heart of the Eurythmics “Sweet Dreams,” and twists it into something even more sinister, yet never disappears down into his gloom sink of previous albums. Perhaps one of the biggest changes is the arrival of Hawkman, a big voiced raggaman who takes up many of the vocals that might have otherwise fallen to Tricky, and delivers himself brilliantly, particularly on the sneakily beautiful “Diss Never (Dig Up We History).”

In contrast to Tricky’s swerve back into the mainstream, Björk has taken a subtle left turn up her own secret street and found yet another playground, with its own female choir and Zeena Parkins on harp. With computer mix duo Matmos assisting with the intricately layered gurgles and rattles that serve Björk where others are reduced to hitting skins with sticks, Björk wraps her voice around you and seduces you entirely. Where Tricky mixes himself into the background in favor of his collaborators, Björk knows that it is only her voice that can make sense of the incredible array of textures she has assembled.

In “Cocoon,” Björk softly swoons and wonders over beauty of a lover who, “after sharing [her] core would stay, going nowhere,” and, when she awakes, is “still inside her.” This is not the bump ‘n booty of R&B, but the intimacy most songwriters avoid, incapable of such self-revelation. Her music, particularly since her film, is often redolent of musicals. “It’s Not Up To You” sounds like a bit like something Sondheim might write in his dreams of the perfect voice. Her childlike, idiosyncratic, careful enunciation recalls the children from the Sound of Music, if it had been written about a hundred years later than it was. While the coda to “Pagan Poetry,” a call-and-response between Björk and her multiplied chorus-self of “I love him/She loves him” has the audacious simplicity that is often only achieved in musicals. The image of Björk as a prodigiously talented child within an adult’s body and voice is fed by her playful treatment of language, like a well-read three-year-old: “It’s not meant to be a strife,” she croons on “Undo.”

The first single, “Hidden Place,” exemplifies this glorious self-revelation, and is also perhaps the most accessible and simply appealing track, with its soaring, choir-backed chorus. It is the overture to the more involved pleasures of the rest of the album, which culminate in the long, seductive curve of “Unison,” which builds slowly over subtle clicks and rattles while the harp supplements Björk’s devastating voice, finally given full rein after an album of largely downplayed numbers. In the end, the song dissolves into arpeggiated harp patterns, and a looped keyboard swirl as Björk disappears into the ice cave from whence she came. If the gods are smiling, perhaps Tricky will be lurking somewhere in the shadows, and ready to play.