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rainbows & robots
DJ Me DJ You
Rainbows and Robots
Emperor Norton

(CD)

click for Real Audio Sound Clip

Buy it at Insound!

There's a good chance that we're preaching to the choir when we recommend Rainbows and Robots, as the debut full-length from Sukia ex-pats Ross Harris and Craig Borrell has been out for a few months now. Discerning fans of funktastically cinematic Bollywood breakbeat epics have most likely already added this album to their collections.

However, due to a series of mix-ups, our review copy of Rainbows and Robots didn't arrive until a couple of weeks ago, so...here we are. Those of you who are contemplating acquiring R&R as one of your twelve free CDs from the Columbia Record, Tape and CD Club should listen up now.

As its title suggests, Rainbows and Robots is a mixture of the trippy and the technological, a melange of sci-fi and psychedelia that teeters on the border between mind-expansion and mind control. Looped loungecore swank grooves rub elbows with Delhi-style sitar samples and whucka-whucka guitars. Breakbeats bump and keyboards burble. Mysterious "found" vocal tracks mutter their disjointed travelogue to the rhythm of swollen, infected scratches. It's post-millennial music for libidinous lounge-lizards who don't wear underwear when the mercury gets above 60 degrees fahrenheit.

Standout tracks? Damn near everything here is easy to love, though the exotic tango of "Spa" should get your nether regions a-tingling, the Haack-ified swagger of "Bite This" will get your hips gyratin' and "El Pollo Amata" should satiate your thirst for intrigue.

Put it this way: some day, when India manages to launch a manned space station and some shifty inner-city guys rent part of it to make porn films there, Rainbows and Robots will be the soundtrack. Won't you be proud to own it then?

-- George Zahora

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