Source: New York Times

"The opening band, Télépathique, is Brazilian, from Sao Paulo, and played slyly metamorphosing dance music: electro to dance-rock to techno to funk, as Érico Theobaldo moved among turntables, laptops and a drum kit. The band’s blithe grooves and tales of desire link it to the knowing internationalist hedonism of CSS, from Brazil, and the Brazilian Girls, from New York City, with plenty of its own smart twists.

Mylene, the band’s singer, arrived onstage in a red dress that showed off her tattoos, started moving to the synth-pop beat and sang, 'I’m not the man you think I am/I’m not that kind of guy.'"

By JON PARELES
Published: September 5, 2008

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A bass line usually propels a song. But not for Tricky, the English trip-hop pioneer whose first tour in five years brought him to the Fillmore New York on Thursday night. The bass lines in Tricky’s music can be speed bumps or pools of quicksand or the rumble of an earth tremor or chasms opening underfoot: something implacable and immobilizing. In the mid-1990s Tricky (whose real name is Adrian Thaws) took the music he absorbed in his hometown, Bristol, England, and traded dance momentum for a bleary, ominous, claustrophobic atmosphere: desperation with a slow, deep pulse.

Darkness is still his milieu. At the Fillmore he and a five-member band — including Veronika Coassolo, who sang lead vocals for most songs, with Tricky growling an octave below — had lights moving through a haze over their heads, barely illuminating themselves, the better to plunge listeners into the songs. Tricky’s new album, “Knowle West Boy” (Domino), which is named after the poor neighborhood where he grew up, partly pries apart the styles he has fused, looking back as he sings about his teenage years. Sometimes women take over the lead vocals to sing about how he misused them.

Onstage he remade songs from the 1980s by the Cure, Public Enemy and XTC, and he reached back to “Karmacoma,” the song that introduced him, early in his performing career, as a guest with Massive Attack. The new songs included Jamaican dancehall rapping (by a guest, Rodigan Morgan) in “Baligaga”; blues in “Puppy Toy”; and punk in “Council Estate”: “Don’t like school in a week we go once/Don’t like the police ’cause they kick and they punch,” he barked.

But this was no attempt at rejuvenation. New and old, the music still had Tricky’s unmistakable foreboding undertow. The crisp dancehall beat of “Baligaga,” for instance, was swathed in sustained keyboard chords. And the concert’s showpieces were slow vamps that oozed and seethed before they finally erupted: “Vent,” a basic blues riff that turned into pounding rock as Tricky howled, “I can hardly breathe!,” and “Past Mistake” and “Joseph,” two songs that ponder betrayal and redemption.

A 19-minute final encore, “Joseph,” almost found release in waves of crescendos that moved toward pounding beats and major chords (rare in Tricky’s catalog), but he declaimed, “You’re so special,” not in triumph, but as a shouted plea.

The opening band, Télépathique, is Brazilian, from Sao Paulo, and played slyly metamorphosing dance music: electro to dance-rock to techno to funk, as Érico Theobaldo moved among turntables, laptops and a drum kit. The band’s blithe grooves and tales of desire link it to the knowing internationalist hedonism of CSS, from Brazil, and the Brazilian Girls, from New York City, with plenty of its own smart twists.

Mylene, the band’s singer, arrived onstage in a red dress that showed off her tattoos, started moving to the synth-pop beat and sang, “I’m not the man you think I am/I’m not that kind of guy.”