Amateur Girlfriends Go Proskirt Agents

Norway must either be an incredibly progressive country, or one with extremely limited musical resources. How else could the overtly aggressive electronic lounge jazz of the duo Xploding Plastix get nominated for that country's version of the Grammys? Amateur Girlfriends Go Proskirt Agents is the sound of Henry Mancini snorting lines of Aphex Twin at a party with the Cinematic Orchestra. It is a surprisingly simple method that involves taking comfortably familiar samples of exotica orchestration, then amp-ing everything up past 11 with the distortion meters settled deep in the red. While the concept is exciting on the first few selections, it begins to stagnate after three or four songs. Fortunately, that is exactly when Xploding Plastix start to break it up. "Single Stroke Ruffs," "Relieved Beyond Repair," and "Happy J**z Girls" all reverse the polarity every few tracks, reducing the orchestral swing down to moody sample pieces in a more traditional trip-hop vein. But the essence of this album still lies in the hyper-speed drumming of "Tintinnamputation" and the banshee string on "Funnybones & Lazylegs," meant to destroy the perfectly coifed attitude of the original cinematic sound sources.