Meat Beat Manifesto have carved out a reliable niche in the world of electronica, owed in no small part to their seemingly indefatigable armada of remixes. Old ideas are never free from tinkering, as evidenced on In Dub, a reimagining of last year's R.U.O.K?. It's a departure from the previous album, the songs' original structures of the songs worked over, turned into something closer to new material than a simple refurbishing. It shifts and slides in all the right places, pulsing and swerving under the radar. I've listened to this disc three times over now and I still can't recall more than a few snippets of it, so perfectly does it blend into the background. But I know that I like it.

In Dub unites the dancehall and the keyboard, an effortless blend of big beats and space-age effects. It's vague without being irrelevant, as the many anti-war soundbites attest -- "Timebomb Dub"'s deadpan dissertation on missile logistics being one high point. ("In the event that the position that it is in is not the position that it wasn't, the system has acquired a variation...") The disc seeks to chill us out rather than riling us up, so that we may better digest the nuggets and the deft sonic cut-and-pasting within. However, it's also vague in the way that a derivative work can never truly break free of its roots; stray too far from the source and you might as well become something altogether new. In Dub sounds like it could have evolved into something all its own, but is constrained from truly emerging from its self-imposed ambiguity. Perhaps that's what I like about it -- the dreamlike quality of seeing something familiar almost come into focus, a new lesson about to be learned just before the dream shifts again. And like a dream, once the CD player shuts off, all I have left are the pleasant wisps of memory... and the repeat button.