(file under tricky)

Nearly God,"Nearly God" (Island/Durban Poison) By CHARLES TAYLOR imagine a room, a shabby room in a rundown part of the city, in which there's a water tap with brown-red rust slowly encrusting the silver, like the decay that has covered every other surface. Everything that takes place in the room happens to the singular beat of water falling drop by drop from that tap with an unvarying rhythm. At times, the beat is so insistent that the water might be bouncing off a rubber drum head. All the sounds that drift through the room -- traffic from the street below, voices from next door, bits of music wafting in, static-y and broken from a badly tuned radio, even your own sighs and breathing -- appear to be orchestrated around the inevitability of that rhythm. After a while, the effort needed to rouse yourself and move through the door seems superhuman. So the world outside shrinks. It feels as if there is nothing beyond the minutely observed reality of that room. That's the sound and feel of "Nearly God," the new project from the British trip-hop artist Tricky (who's incognito here), with a roster of guest vocalists that includes Björk, Neneh Cherry, Alison Moyet and Terry Hall (ex-Specials and Fun Boy Three). Trip-hop, as the name suggests, is a slowed-down version of hip-hop with instruments that cut in and out, bass and drums combining for a muffled but smooth, insistent, even ominous beat, and vocals (when there are vocals) that seem to be whispering to us from an opium haze. As a genre, trip-hop is the sound of Sly Stone's seminal "There's a Riot Goin' On" re-conceived as dance music. It's urban music that's simultaneously about facing up to urban life and wanting to escape it, into drugs or vague fantasies of utopia. You could hear how Tricky's last album, "Maxinquaye," grew out of "There's a Riot Goin' On," not just sonically but politically. Sly's album was about the cultural and political fragmentation of being black in America as the promise of the '60s fell apart and the law-and-order ethos of the Nixon years took hold. Tricky's move was to transplant that feeling to post-Thatcher Britain. "Maxinquaye" was the sound made by someone who'd been marginalized so long he was able to work the margins unnoticed, gaining strength, creeping into whatever crevice of the mainstream he found unguarded. If "Riot" was the sound of a man feeling outside the boundaries of his situation, "Maxinquaye" was the sound of someone pushing back boundaries lived with so long that their vulnerability has become obvious. It was a dark album, but an inspiring one. Listening to it, you could fantasize that the revolution might be closer, quieter and more decisive than anyone had imagined. "Nearly God" heads right back to the margins. It's far more extreme and fragmented than "Maxinquaye." Without the benefit of a groove to settle into on most tracks, you're stranded in the suffocating psychic states the album describes. If you can imagine the animators the Brothers Quay transferring their oblique and menacing tone to black music, this is it. The opening track, "Tattoo," begins with the sound of Tricky chuckling, exhaling smoke (a spliff?). The tense, vibrating sound of a bow being drawn across a cello drifts in and out, competing with jangles and vague, ghostly wails -- the sound of a rehearsal for a performance that will never come. Tricky moans "cover me" -- or "cuddle me" or "color me" or "come to me," it isn't clear -- over and over. What is clear is that he's in a room, and something else is, too; maybe it's tied to the bed, maybe it's right in front of him. He sings "fortify my arms," as if he's ready to fight, but it sounds as if it's all he can do to focus his eyes. The tempo never builds or changes; the tension never breaks. On "Nearly God," every sound reaches us through an industrial grind. It's the feel of life reduced to soul-destroying sameness. Anything that promises lyricism, like the string progression on "I'll Be the Prophet," surrenders to a mocking repetition. Alison Moyet's soul shouting on "Make a Change," the title itself a dark joke, keeps straining to break free before fading into the background. The release that soul music provides -- the unfettered expression of emotion -- is nonexistent here. The jilted lover's refrain of the haunting "Poems" ("you promised me poems") is the sound of people wondering how they could have ever been full enough to believe in the possibility of beauty. The moments of seeming strength dissolve in ambiguity: Tricky singing "I ain't going down that road again" could be either defiance or compliance, an acknowledgment of the song's refrain, "it's best to keep your mouth shut, baby." It's Tricky's version of "Black Coffee," though, that best relates the private hell of these songs to a larger, shared hell. "Black Coffee" (which k.d. lang has also recorded) merges the moods of Otis Redding's "Cigarettes and Coffee" and Billie Holliday's "Gloomy Monday," and joins them to a sample of the jittery piano and drum riff from Elvis Costello's "Pills and Soap," the song in which Thatcher's Britain has become a concentration camp. Martine Topley Bird's vocals aren't so much the sound of someone whose nerves are about to snap, but of someone finding out how far they can be stretched. "I watch the door," she sings, both longing to go through it and fearing what's on the other side -- or what might be about to bust through. "Nearly God" is the darkest, most difficult and disturbing music pop has produced this year, and despite the prevalent feel of exhaustion, some of the strongest. It's possible that Tricky considers this no more than a digression from work performed under his own name, but there's no escaping that it takes the stoned expansiveness of "Maxinquaye" and turns it back on itself. It's trip-hop's version of Poe's shrinking closet. It's damn impressive, but it ain't a groove. Charles Taylor, a frequent contributor to Salon, also writes about music and film for the Boston Phoenix.

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