Juxtapose

Here he comes again, Tricky, leering out of the spliff-smog, all expectations of ever recreating the warped coffee table perversions of Maxinquaye well and truly dispelled by those difficult second and third albums.

Difficult for the unsuspecting bystanders drawn into his web that is; the Trickster had no problems spewing out those sparse and piecemeal concertos - not to mention the Nearly God project - like some dark Prince in the throes of crack psychosis, too prolific for the marketing department, too insane in the membrane for the record company's liking.

The word on the wire telegraphed Juxtapose as a return to form after the murky Angels With Dirty Faces, but beware, this isn't his oft-hinted-at New York Fuckin' City hip-hop masterpiece. Instead, it's a mind-meld of Euro art-rock guitar-synth sorcery, Harry Partch percussion, fragmented classical figures and a rat's nest of rhymes, all channeled through a four-dimensional mix as insidious as a pathogen.

Tricky by nature - in the opening 'For Real' you can just see him lurking in Ray Bradbury's carnival of souls, shuffling the tarot, counselling youngsters to beware of Hollywood's hall of mirrors, his forked tongue poking between his lips as he riddles out half-truisms and happy fallacies. Later in the programme, 'Call Me' suggests a hellish (under)world music hatched in the brightest, bleakest Zaire, the sound of a dark continent cracking, while on the other side of the analogy, the carved up poodle metal solo in 'Bom Bom Diggy' seems to signify the decay of a western world gorged on its own madness.

Somewhere in the middle of this album's merciful 35 minutes, between the hard-boiled bullet beats of 'She Said' and the lesbian fantasies of the string driven 'I Like The Girls', the listener starts to feel like some barfly fall-guy who's had his absinthe spiked and wakes up in a dim room surrounded by sinister cameo players like Cypress Hill's DJ Muggs, Mad Dog and D'NA, babbling like auctioneers, queer visions swimming in their eyes. Throughout this ordeal, Art Of Noise-style samples shriek, Martine's successor Kioka Williams croons, and Tricky whispers hotly in your ear, conjuring an unbearably claustrophobic funk.

Much of Juxtapose feels like brain surgery without anaesthetic: a violent, multi-phonic assault which only ceases with the corpse-waltz of 'Wash My Soul', a disfigured piece of classical trash that almost recalls the salving tones of 1995's 'Pumpkin'. And the closing 'Scrappy Love' is yet another departure; a hypnotic hybrid which quotes everyone from Laurie Anderson to Michael Nyman to Philip Glass before receding into silence like some malevolently chemical fog.

Juxtapose is a brief but bio-hazardously potent portent of things to come. Tricky's got his mojo workin' again.