Chris Joss may have just circumvented all of the Hollywood brass by making the best soundtrack to a Guy Ritchie film I've ever heard, without actually bothering to make a Guy Ritchie film...

You've Been Spiked is vintage mod swagger and go-go boots sexy, the kind of smoky street music you know should be accompanied by shadowy men striding down darkened alleys, wearing fabulous waistcoats and brandishing impossibly polished pistols. Filled with rambunctious energy and pitch-perfect respect for the era it's lustily aping, You've Been Spiked is a compelling time capsule -- try not getting drawn into it. Whether it's the title track's taut basslines, the thick wah-wah action on "Shellah V." or the cagey steel drums that kickstart "Drink Me Hot", each track will hook you from the get-go, as if you've suddenly been blessed with the option of embodying Starsky or Hutch -- or Huggy Bear. Come to think of it, if Grand Theft Auto ever revisits the funk era, Chris Joss might be getting a call about some in-game music.

Everything here is far too slick to sound truly authentic -- the production values expand through the roof. Even the imperfections are placed a little too perfectly for their own good, betraying the hand of a fastidious composer and producer. But that's half the fun (and most of the point): Joss seems to have made You've Been Spiked solely to illustrate just how much better the late '60s and early '70s would have been if our state-of-the-art audio equipment had arrived thirty years early. Having enjoyed the hell out of successive spins of this disc, I'm hard pressed to disagree.