It's been three years since Roni Size and his Reprazent crew created perhaps the greatest drum and bass album ever made, the Mercury Music Prize-winning New Forms. Since then there has been the sclerotic project Breakbeat Era and Krust's own Coded Language work, while drum and bass itself has become ever more hard and insular. It has also become more marginalised in the UK while its popularity overseas has inversely increased, embraced as a kind of electronic punk. All this is reflected in In The Mode-a harder, more international album. Method Man, The Roots' Rhazel and Rage Against The Machine's Zack de la Rocha are employed for a transatlantic celebrity shine and the mood is less groove, more grind. At times the energy and gravity-defying twists and turns of Size's production is stunning but only Rahzel appears to be comfortable with Reprazent's shape-shifting beats. The rest are on auto-pilot (though check Meth's Lady Di lyric) and the soulfulness of UK singer Onalee appears to have been put to one side, depriving In The Mode of her song-writing skills. There is little here that matches "Heroes", "Share The Fall" or "Watching Windows". Neither is there anything as instantly funky as "Brown Paper Bag" (though "System Check" echoes it). This doesn't make In The Mode a bad album. [+]

Pioneers of Post-Chemical Brothers big beat, the Propellerheads' first album is a fresh take on a tired genre. Alex Gifford, formerly of the Grid, and Will White have gone from strength to strength with their blend of breakbeat techno, hip-hop and 1960s kitsch. Like Fatboy Slim, they inject humour into the rather dry dance scene with tunes like "Velvet Pants" ("He's got a good body / He's wearing velvet pants"). Decksanddrumsandrockandroll features collaborations with De La Soul ("360 Degrees"), the Jungle Bros ("You Want It Back") and the illustrious Shirley Bassey on their top-40 hit "History Repeating". However, the best single on the record is their version of the underrated soundtrack from the Bond film On Her Majesty's Secret Service, which does not destroy but refreshes the classic John Barry original. -Ed Potton.

A native of Cornwall, Richard James is obsessed with the mechanics of music making: As a kid, he took apart and reassembled the living room piano. Under the names Aphex Twin, Polygon Window, AFX and other aliases too numerous to mention, he showed that he could make entire tracks with the sounds produced by tapping on a Coke can. Like the indie rockers of yore, he revels in his marginality because of the creative freedom it gives him. None of his recordings have captured the competing impulses to lull you to sleep and blast out your eardrums as well as Richard D. James, his third and best album. As the title indicates, James has turned inward for inspiration, painting aural pictures of real and imagined scenes from his west country childhood. "Goongumpas" is a fanciful, playful tune that wouldn't sound out of place on the soundtrack to Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. As his adventures with the family upright indicate, James was a bit of a devil even as a child. "Beetles" is the sound of a boy frying bugs on the sidewalk with a magnifying glass and "To Cure A Weakling Child" shows flashes of the sort of sadism found only on primary school playgrounds. If you still doubt that young Richard developed early on, the romantic Nino Rota-style strings on "Girl/Boy Song" are just made for passionate seductions, and the tune appears in three mixes, each one hot and hornier than the one before. [+]

This Deluxe Edition includes a bonus CD of demos, alternate versions and remixes. DJ Shadow, a. k. a. Josh Davis, could be credited with bringing newfound introspection to the gloating sounds of hip-hop. Condensed with urban oscillations and scatological beats, Endtroducing. shutters with eclectic samples and aural montages that reach beyond the constraints of hip-hop style. Enhancing the mix with fundamentals of rock, soul, funk, ambient, and jazz, the modern fusions fail to go unnoticed, even by the casual listener. [+]

On a crystal clear English summer's evening in the summer of 2001, Norman Cook played his most celebrated DJ set Live On Brighton Beach. In front of an estimated 30,000 loved-up Brightonians dancing on the pebbles, the man known to millions as Fatboy Slim took to the decks for two hours of typically hedonistic party mayhem. It's these two hours-or, at least, an edited version of them-that make our Norm's first mix album in yonks and a perfect souvenir of the night now known as "Normstock". Sound wise, the album sees Mr Zoe Ball doing what he does best-mashing up thumping dancefloor favourites in a sweat-drenched party stylee. Those expecting classic big beat belters are in for a shock, though, 'cos these days the Fatboy is more into straight-up house and techno-albeit with the aforementioned party twist. So, we get some of 2001's biggest records-Basement Jaxx's "Where's Your Head At?", Raven Maze's "The Real Life", a couple from Santos-alongside a smatering of classics (Leftfield's "Phat Planet", an anthemic version of Underworld's "Born Slippy") and the off Fatboy number to keep the punters sweet. The result is a hot, sweaty, grimy mix that perfectly captures the sound and feel of Norman Cook's DJ sets, even if it does feel a touch out of date. -Matt Anniss.

The collaboration of studio whiz Geoff Barrow and singer Beth Gibbons, Dummy was made at the same time as a short film noir called To Kill a Dead Man, and the same approach-gloomy, tormented, and wildly melodramatic-permeates the album. "Sour Times" (the hit in which Gibbons cries, again and again, "Nobody loves me, it's true") and the more cryptic "Glory Box" are the linchpins of the album, defining its sound: dark flashes of old soul and film music, dehumanised electronic bleeps, Gibbons emoting like she's consumed by shame, and a bass-and-beat pulse derived from the slow bump and grind of the Bristol scene that spawned Barrow's old collaborators, Massive Attack. -Douglas Wolk.

For a debut album, Martina Topley Bird's Quixotic comes with a staggering weight of expectation. If her name is only vaguely familiar, her drunken twilight whisper is unmistakable. First heard on Tricky's genre-defining debut Maxinquaye and the subsequent albums Pre-Millennium Tension and Angels with Dirty Faces, hers is arguably the voice of trip hop. Working with Bristol's voice of doom has left a tough legacy to live up to. Amazingly, Quixotic far exceeds it. It's a phenomenally sensual album, full of the thick atmospheres, moody swaggers and dark undercurrents that she and Tricky were once synonymous with, but here they're married to equally mesmerising songs. Hence "Lullaby" and "Days of a Gun" are as memorable for their beautiful melodies as they are for their respective backing tracks of drowsy porch light blues and caressing synths. Meanwhile, an eclectic list of collaborators line up to add a touch of malevolence to her slumber-like vocals. Queens of the Stone Age's Josh Homme provides the lumbering rock for first single "Need One", DJ/Producer David Holmes digs out some swampy blues samples and demonic slide guitars for "Too Tough to Die" and Tricky himself adds his trademark claustrophobia to twisted love song "Ragga". And as if all that wasn't enough, thanks to monumental orchestration from James Bond composer David Arnold, the smothering "Soulfood" is possibly the most powerful, glorious and humbling soul ballad ever. [+]

Morcheeba served as the template for subsequent "trip-hop" combos, with a line-up that consisted of brothers Ross and Paul Godfrey (both steeped in a musical heritage ranging from Hendrix to roots reggae, from which they cherry-picked at will) and female vocalist Skye Edwards, whose languid vocals melted into the brothers' melange of slide guitars, scratch DJing dub and tablas like cream into coffee. "Who Can You Trust" didn't immediately win over the dance crowd, moving as it did at Mississippi pace through a marijuana haze of sound. The album's standout tracks, however, including "Tape Loop" and "Trigger Hippie", an almost edible concoction of dark funky ingredients, ensured that it became a slow-burning and widely imitated landmark mid-1990s album. -David Stubbs.

The excellent double-CD compilation The Way of Curveis an appropriate and overdue tribute to a group who would still sound about a hundred years ahead of their time if they appeared now. The title is well chosen: Curve were one of those bands whose influence ballooned quickly out of proportion to their record sales. Curve's influences were always pretty obvious-My Bloody Valentine, Nine Inch Nails, The Cure, The Jesus and Mary Chain circa "Automatic"-but Curve's deft and dazzling synthesis of electronica, hip-hop and rock & roll would later echo in the works of U2 (particularly on Pop), Garbage and Marilyn Manson, among many others. For a duo whose CVs had previously amounted to an abortive solo career (in the case of Toni Halliday) and a stint as Eurythmics' bassplayer (Dean Garcia), Curve's career amounted to a sensational surprise. The first disc of this set contains 16 tracks spanning Curve's canon from 1990 until the present day, the second a selection of rarities and unreleased recordings. Particular highlights of the latter include Curve's faintly terrifying cover of Donna Summer's "I Feel Love", a duet with the late Ian Dury on Dury's own "What a Waste" and a Kevin Shields remix of "Coming Up Roses". -Andrew Mueller.

Understood in any language, across any time zone, Global Communication tolls for the human spirit which knows no boundaries. As one of the most significant releases to cross the ambient currents of the 1990s, 76:14 places itself alongside benchmark electronic releases from Brian Eno, the Orb, and the Future Sound of London. These synth-dominated ventures allow the armchair traveller to indulge in atmospheric wanderings which suggest virtual galactic discovery. But often enough the textured beats keep things grounded to dissuade the listener from being lost in the void. Vocal samples from nine languages also remind us of the international and diplomatic intentions of this otherwise electro-instrumental album. Strap in and enjoy the lift-off for all mankind. -Lucas Hilber.

Unfairly dismissed by much of the electronica cognoscenti-too commercial, some sniffed: too calculated-this was, nevertheless, an ambitious (and mostly satisfying) attempt to fuse the volume and density of rock with the broad textural vocabulary of electronica. The single, "Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Dub," effectively defined the template, marrying a corrosive Van Halen guitar sample to chattering breakbeats; the remainder of the album was divided between variations on this theme (the slide guitar propelling "Altamont Super-Highway Revisited," the bluesy shuffle of "Tears Of The Gods"), and moments of almost meditative stillness, courtesy of the group's other incarnation, the Stealth Sonic Orchestra. The most accomplished of the latter is a ballad titled "Pain In Any Language," which features the last recorded vocal of late Associates frontman Billy MacKenzie, to whose memory this bold and singular album is dedicated. -Andrew McGuire.