Nearly God "Nearly God"

You'll find the whole album reviewed here and not just the parts Björk are on.

When Tricky released the album "Maxinquaye" spring 95 he became the face of trip hop. Tricky's latest project Nearly God with vocal-efforts from Terry Hall, Björk, Martina, Neneh Cherry, Alsion Moyet and Cath Coffey is not trip hop. It's an incredible mixture between jazz, soul, rock and hip hop and the result is something incredible, something that's impossible to categorize. This album brings you sweet soul as well as dark, spiritual uncategorizable music and it's never very easy to listen to. Lines like "Life is just one bloody thing after an other" and samples that any other trip hop-guru should use plenty of times just becomes hardly audible whispers and that makes the whole thing much scarier. The album's first single "Poems" is a seven minutes long spooky track where Tricky, Terry Hall and Martina are "switch-singing" to a silent organ. I guess what makes that track scary is the extremely low volume that must have been reached while recording it. Tricky's talk-singing very silent in his own inimitable way many times at this album for example in the excellent harp-based "I be the prophet" and the effect it brings to the listener is incredible. In the opening track "Tattoo" he's singing along to harmonic violins but that doesn't turn down the effect.

I guess you all wonder how Björk's voice is managing beside all these spooky Tricky-compositions and I can tell you she's giving a good account on herself. Björk is singing two duets with Tricky. The first one is called "Keep your mouth shut" and that one's very experimental even to be Björk or Tricky. Tricky has been cutting three songs to pieces (Björk's "You've been flirting again", Das FX's "Dedicated" and his own "Keep your mouth shut") and then he has been throwing the pieces all over each other. Sometimes it sounds brilliant, sometimes it's just annoying. The second track featuring Björk is called "Yoga". It's an OK track with some really strange backing vocals from Tricky. Although the best tracks on this albums are the slow soul-tracks. The piano-based "Black coffee" with vocalizations from Martina and the exotic "I sing for you" with vocalizations from Cath Coffey are both incredible soul-songs with some of the best melodies so far this year. "Nearly God" is an amazing album but it isn't very Björky. Björk has just been co-writing two of the tracks. What I'm trying to say is that you will probably not like this album if you're not a fan of Tricky's music. But I wasn't a fan of Tricky's music until I bought this album....