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Tracklist (Vinyl)
A1 | | Money Greedy | | | A2 | | Mellow | | | A3 | | Singing The Blues | | | A4 | | Broken Homes | | | B1 | | 6 Minutes | | | B2 | | Analyze Me | | | B3 | | The Moment I Feared | | | See more tracksC1 | | Talk To Me (Angels With Dirty Faces) | | | C2 | | Carriage For Two | | | C3 | | Demise | | | C4 | | Tear Out My Eyes | | | D1 | | Record Companies | | | D2 | | Peyote Sings | | | D3 | | Taxi | | |
* Items below may differ depending on the release.
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Review Tricky saw the future on his first two albums: With 1995's Maxinquaye, he played foster father to a freshly hatched brat called trip-hop; on his follow-up, 1996's Pre-Millennium Tension, he created a fractured, transgenre masterpiece, Now, on his third solo album, the sonic auteur turns to his past. Like its predecessors, Angels With Dirty Faces revolves around montages: Spooky, hollowed-out blues riffs serve as disjunctive counterpoint to Martina Topley-Bird's soulful vocals; stammering beats and bass lines splinter, then coalesce… Read More into deep-dub pudding. But in spirit, the album cuts closer to Tricky's 1996 hip-hop EP, Return to the Grassroots recorded shortly after he relocated to New York than it does to Pre-Millennium's chilly soundscapes. Angels delights in blurring stylistic borders, but it also strives to forge earthy connections. The result is Tricky's most personal yet quixotically estranged work to date. On "Broken Homes," guest PJ Harvey's husky white-soul vocal (backed by a gospel choir) mourns gangsta violence while Tricky relegates himself to a whispering ghost who softly laments, "We lose our voice more each year/Alive is pain, murder is fame." With the next track, "6 Minutes," he moves up to first-person singular with a funky guitar as backup, declaring in his asthmatic, ganja-damaged croak, "Now it's gone too far/And all the tough guys are dropping like flies." In the melancholy, jazz-inflected "Demise," Tricky acknowledges both his alienation from and his kinship with rap's OG vanguard: "I'm too scared to be a gun-toting gangsta wannabe," he confesses. Angels With Dirty Faces is more than a star's gratuitous shout-out to the homeys: It's a renegade Brit B-boy's caustic, lyrical declaration of self. In abandoning his brilliant but lonely musical diaspora, trip-hop's mongrel daddy has found his hip-hop soul. (RS 789) NEVA CHONIN |