**1/2 Tricky

ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES

(Island)

The trip-hop triumvirate that emerged out of the early-'90s Bristol scene included one groovy collective (Massive Attack), an alluringly cinematic duo (Portishead), and a mumbling maverick by the name of Tricky (a/k/a Adrian Thawes). Less overtly reggae than Massive Attack, pricklier than Portishead, and proclaiming allegiance to rap through his sampling of Public Enemy and his history of gangbanging, Tricky styled himself a hip-hop surrealist, dropping his beats and samples sparsely, favoring implied grooves and out-of-focus melodies. It didn't sound particularly hip-hop on his first two solo discs or on his multi-vocalist side project Nearly God, and it doesn't here on Angels with Dirty Faces, though occasionally you can sense a connection. It's more an abstraction of hip-hop, an aural architectural metaphor that's been lived in long enough to be comfortable but not so long as to have grown dull.

On Angels, Tricky uses a live backing band -- including guitarist Marc Ribot and cellist Jane Scarpantoni -- as well as singer Martine Topley-Bird (a Tricky regular) and, on one tune, PJ Harvey, but everything's so skewed and tweaked that you'd hardly know it. There's something almost heroic about the lengths to which Tricky seems to go to subvert convention, even if it does leave most of the tracks here stripped of any semblance of a hook. "We do this with or without airplay," he points out on "6 Minutes," and you get the sense that he knows this time it'll be mostly without.

-- Matt Ashare