ALBUM REVIEWS

*** 1/2 Tricky, “Angels With Dirty Faces,” Island. Tricky’s music conjures a subterranean world in which entropy and psychic oppression are pervasive--his music is hopelessly enervated and claustrophobic.

Although the Bristol, England, producer originally aligned himself with Massive Attack and the incipient trip-hop movement of the early ‘90s, Tricky’s eccentric solo work shares little with that genre. If anything, it more closely resembles the paranoid sci-fi dystopias of Phillip K. Dick and Robert Heinlein--creepy, disembodied voices whisper in your ear while an uneasy alliance of wobbly drums, dub-like bass lines and jagged samples crawl under your skin.

“Angels’ ” dense constructs are similar to the ones found on 1996’s “Pre-Millennium Tension”: Tricky creates drama by combining disparate sounds that appear to be uncomfortably close or frustratingly far off in the distance.

Nearly every track starts with a deceptively simple melodic motif--a spy-movie guitar riff on “Singing the Blues,” or tinkling chimes on “6 Minutes”--on which Tricky piles gothic filigree, such as ghostly, free-association vocals that rub against the grain, moaning flutes and serpentine drum patterns.

Tricky toys with trip-hop textures, only to subvert them: Quiet grooves begin to assert themselves on tracks such as “Demise” and “The Moment I Feared,” then crumble into odd-time abstractions. “Angels With Dirty Faces” is unsettling--and rarely pretty--but nearly always compelling.

Albums are rated on a scale of one star (poor), two stars (fair), three stars (good) and four stars (excellent).