On Pre-Millennium Tension, Tricky sucks you into his web of paranoia with rugged, richly nuanced soundscapes meant more for the headphones than the dance floor. He layers distorted guitars, disorienting digital effects and the exquisite soul crooning of his musical partner Martina Topley Bird over fractured loops and vintage hip-hop beats, creating music with an abstract, minimalist edge that is closer in spirit to the work of Prince or Lee "Scratch" Perry than to the cool school of trip-hop. From the wobbly guitar figure and wiry beat that underpin the suffocating opener, "Vent," to the feeling of doomed melancholy in Tricky's stoned rap in "My Evil Is Strong" and the sinister harmonica in "Sex Drive," most of the tracks here seethe with menace.

Pre-Millennium Tension was recorded in Ocho Rios, Jamaica, and the spirit of reggae informs the music, not only in the patois toasting in "Ghetto Youth," but in the rumbling, dublike backdrops of "Bad Things" and "Piano." But hip-hop is Tricky's root sound, and unlike his recent side project Tricky Presents Grassroots, which was mired in clunky gangsta stylings, Pre-Millennium Tension shows him masterfully exploiting the parallels between New York rap and his own street-wise vision. He quotes Grandmaster Flash in "Vent," borrows the beat from Eric B. and Rakim's "To the Listeners" for "Makes Me Wanna Die," and even turns in a staggering remake of Eric B. and Rakim's classic "Lyrics of Fury." Still, for Tricky, hardcore hip-hop is still just a launch pad for a complex, deeply personal music that is arguably the most vital and undefinable in pop. (RS 749)

JASON FINE