Tricky - Angels With Dirty Faces

A haunting album from a tortured soul, and one of the most sought-after records in the Tricky catalog, finally repressed for the first time exclusively on orange colored vinyl. Released on May 25, 1998 on Island Records and named after the classic 1938 James Cagney gangster film, Angels With Dirty Faces is Tricky's third album and one of his most unsettling and fully realized works, a record that is simultaneously challenging and gorgeous, defiant and despairing, tight and tense and curiously beautiful.

Recorded across an extraordinary range of studios in Nassau, New Orleans, Bristol, New York, and Bearsville, the album marks a significant shift from the psychedelic trip-hop of its predecessors, with Tricky incorporating a full live band for the first time and the results crackling with nervous, post-millennial energy. "I don't like this century," he mutters on "Record Companies," and that line sums up the album's worldview as eloquently as anything else on it. Martina Topley-Bird returns as his essential vocal foil throughout, her ethereal presence the counterweight to Tricky's stream-of-consciousness paranoia. The guest list is remarkable: PJ Harvey lends her voice to the haunting "Broken Homes," Anthrax guitarist Scott Ian brings unexpected muscle to "Carriage for Two," and Marc Ribot adds his distinctively twisted guitar lines to several tracks. A cover of Slick Rick's "The Moment I Feared" continues Tricky's long tradition of reimagining hip-hop classics in his own unsettling image.

This double LP edition includes two tracks not available on the original CD release: "Peyote Sings" and "Taxi," both longtime favorites among devotees of the vinyl pressing. On orange vinyl and available exclusively for Record Store Day, this is the definitive way to own one of the great overlooked records of the late 1990s.