Urban Gamelan

Urban Gamelan is of two distinct halves. The first half, featuring new bassist Sketch, is grounded in 23 Skidoo's love of funk, reggae, and Afrobeat. "F.U.G.I." would later be re-fashioned into "Coup," the brilliant track that would be sampled liberally by the Chemical Brothers for "Block Rockin' Beats"; though it's not as tight and bracing as "Coup," "F.U.G.I." has a nasty low-slung lope to it, made all the more ominous by the desperate, distant voice that repeatedly screams, "G.I. — f*ck you!" "Fire" is an unremarkable spaghetti Eastern gone dub, while both "Misr Wakening" and "Jalan Jalan" — two slow-rolling percussion exercises — have the same type of paranoid and pensive qualities heard on Seven Songs. The second half sees the group as industrial-style percussionists, fashioning instruments from scraps of sheet metal and battering and scraping them into hypnotic but occasionally tedious pieces. "Helicopterz" is particularly lulling and fragile; at the other end of the spectrum, there's "Sirens," a startling minute of frenetic rattling. The layers with which the separate tracks are made are several, and the fact that each one was recorded live is extremely impressive, though the results aren't nearly as engaging as the group's avant-funk material. [The LTM version of the album adds both sides of the "Coup" and "Language" 12" singles.]