If you're one of those lucky souls blessed with the gift of synesthesia (a condition in which the hearing of a sound may cause the listener to visualize a colour), you may not feel so lucky when listening to this album. What you'll picture in your mind's eye when you hear Darkdancer is the worst music video you've ever seen: feather-haired folks in red leather jackets with a surfeit of diagonal zippers wandering through a landscape of fluorescent geometric shapes. At the climax, everything moves in slow motion. Welcome back to the 1980s. Les Rhythmes Digitales, a. k. a. Jacques Lu Cont (an Englishman despite the name), digs that woebegone decade enough to make up for everyone else's lack of enthusiasm. On what is for all intents and purposes his debut, he's aimed his arsenal of vintage analog synths at your nostalgia and pleasure zones. The result is a smooth tour of eurythmic bass lines, vocoderizations, and a guest appearance from Canadian big-in-the-U. [+]

Like fellow futurists Stereolab and Broadcast, psychedelic crusaders the Experimental Pop Band aim to position themselves on music's cutting edge by rummaging through the cast-off bag of music's past. The Tracksuit Trilogy is an unashamedly postmodern production-a psychedelic riot of backward disco loops and ancient, squawking moogs, with lyrics to match. Laconic frontman Davey Woodward's bag is the counter-cultural lingo of the bohemian 1960s and the fearless party ethic of the hedonistic 1980s-and it's all there on the opening "Bang Bang You're Dead", a whispered tale of international espionage, drug-running and scrapes with the Hell's Angels, recalled through a fuzzy daze of "vodka and coke, and tantric sex". All pretty groovy stuff; the Experimental Pop Band clearly conduct their heists with a wry sense of humour that the likes of fellow vault-breakers Primal Scream lack, and on the psychedelic disco breakdown of "Emotion", this arched eyebrow fits the song like a latex boob-tube. Sometimes, though, this sardonic attitude leaves The Tracksuit Trilogy lacking in a certain sincerity; by the gorgeous "Remember", you're left wondering if that waver in Woodward's voice is the sound of honesty stripped bare, or just the dressing of an expertly rendered Velvet Underground pastiche. EPB promise a good time, that's for sure-but The Tracksuit Trilogy offers an unusually hollow hedonism. -Louis Pattison.