CD REVIEWS: DANCE

MR OIZO: ANALOGUE WORMS ATTACK

(F Communications)

Quentin Dupieux's debut album has a sticker on it with an endorsement from his grubby yellow puppet friend, Flat Eric: "This is the music I dance to." Bizzarely, I suspect that it will actually sell quite well on the basis of this recommendation, while perhaps not getting the respect it deserves from the serious techno community. It's an accomplished album of bass, heavy breakbeat and minimalist techno enlivened with some scratching and all manner of squelchy acid-lines. There's not a huge amount of variety but with 15 tracks in 55 minutes, they're mostly quite short. As a whole it ticks along nicely, peaking every now and then with numbers like "No Day Massacre", a funky, unpredictable piece of breakbeat, or "Inside the Kidney Machine", when Mr Oizo picks up the tempo and finds some undulating, reverberating basslines hidden deep in his Roland 303. Analogue Worms Attack comes with Flat Eric screen savers and the videos for "M-Seq" and "Flat Beat", but essentially it's quality French techno with some very serious bass.