A TORRENT OF TRICKY : MAN OF THE MOMENT OUT TO PROVE HIMSELF WITH THREE ALBUMS STRADDLING RAP AND ROCK.

Byline: Neil Strauss The New York Times

Tricky, the English dance-music maverick, is one of the most important musicians recording today. A former miscreant from the streets and jail cells of Bristol, he has been rearranging the face of pop music from the outside.

In his hands, loping beats cobbled out of sound effects and laid-back vocals that forebode and reverberate as if delivered from the barrel of a shotgun have been turned into a new lounge music for a society on the edge of cataclysm.

A fast-moving, instinct-driven chameleon, he has in the last three months released three albums, each one an attempt to prove that he can approach any style of music (be it punk, hip-hop or pop) and do it differently and better than anyone else.

Tricky is a huckster, a burned-out scam artist who has started to believe his own braggadocio as much as he does the press clippings calling him a genius. A former member of the Massive Attack dance-music collective, he has, since his promising first album, ``Maxinquaye,'' merely succeeded in letting the air out of the hopes the music world had for him, proving himself to be little more than a rapper compensating for the fact that he can't rap.

A collaboration with members of the Wu-Tang Clan only demonstrated how much of Tricky's sound was derived from that hip-hop group's recordings. With his next three albums, he walked into the studio boasting about how he could do anything in any style and blow anyone away. But he just ended up with lazier, more scattered albums that all sounded similar.

If these two views of Tricky are contradictory, it's because for the past year Tricky has been one of pop's most frustrating conundrums. He is like a person who, upon first meeting, one feels instantly attracted to. But the more one sees and hears of him, the less one trusts him.

It's hard to know whether he is about to do something great or terrible, whether he is lying or telling the truth, whether he is in a good mood or looking for a fight. He is like a '90s version of Prince, an enigma but one worth watching to see if it can be resolved.

The last time I saw Tricky was in a much-reported incident at the Roxy in Manhattan two months ago. He was being escorted out of the club by two large bouncers, having just been in a shoving match with Goldie, an English jungle musician who is dating Tricky's former girlfriend, Bjork.

Earlier, wearing a leather jacket over a dress, Tricky was complaining about the music industry in New York, where he lives, calling it racist.

I did hear Tricky perform last month at Vinyl, a club in lower Manhattan, but I didn't see him. The stage was so low and dimly lighted that only people in the first few rows could see anything.

The show ended in a half hour, with Tricky walking offstage, leaving his band completely confused. That was a relief, because Tricky seemed unfit to perform his songs, mumbling and slurring his way through them for reasons having to do with either indifference or the marijuana he says he smokes regularly.

So one has to come to one of three conclusions: Tricky is either a trailblazer who has lost his way, a stubbornly individual musician saddled with the wrong kinds of expectations after his first album, or a performer who has made inconsistency part of his style. The answer is probably a combination of all three, as his new albums demonstrate.

The five-song ``Tricky Presents Grass Roots'' (Payday/FFRR), a collaboration with a mixed bag of New York rappers and singers, sounds like a hip-hop album recorded in a submarine plumbing the ocean's depths, full of metallic clangs, radar pings and echoing vocals.

The second album, ``Nearly God'' (Island), featuring vocals from Bjork, Neneh Cherry and Terry Hall of the Specials, removes the lightness from rhythm-and-blues to create a deep, dark, spaced-out funk.

His latest album, ``Pre-Millennium Tension,'' a tissue of versions of and quotes from rap songs, is the best of the three. Recorded in Jamaica and released last week on Island Records, it opens with ``Vent,'' which subverts Tricky's walls-are-closing-in paranoia by turning lyrics like ``can't hardly breathe'' into a song about a missing asthma inhaler.

The album's centerpiece is ``Tricky Kid.'' ``Everybody wants to be just like me,'' Tricky sings in a cracking, menacing voice. ``I'm naked and famous.''

It would be a funny, self-mocking anthem if self-mocking was in Tricky's nature. As it stands, ``Tricky Kid'' features the would-be rapper as Scarface, drug-addled and driven half mad by his ego. If Snoop Doggy Dogg is hip-hop's unleashed canine, all bark and bite, Tricky is its slinking cat - nervous, neurotic and hyper-alert.

At their best, these albums open up a world beyond rap and rock, replacing violence, angst and energy with a pent-up agitation. In ``Vent,'' Tricky paraphrases the Grandmaster Flash line, ``Don't push me because I'm too close to the edge.''

His music never moves from that edge. It is harsh, sparse and distorted, yet it still has the slow, cool manner of a bully sizing up a victim before throwing the first punch.

It is this sound, along with the music of his fellow Bristol bands Portishead and Massive Attack, that has replaced Sade's smooth soul as an atmospheric soundtrack in trendy cafes and bars.

At a time when alternative rock is on the wane and hip-hop is at a creative crisis, Tricky has the potential to merge the audiences of each into one that is less conscious of race and class than of mood and feeling. One wonders if he will live up to that potential.

CAPTION(S):

Photo

Photo: A former member of the dance-music collective Massive Attack, the multitalented Tricky has release three albums in the last three months.