Urban Gamelan

is of two distinct halves. The first half, featuring new bassist , is grounded in 's love of , , and . would later be re-fashioned into the brilliant track that would be sampled liberally by for ; though it's not as tight and bracing as has a nasty low-slung lope to it, made all the more ominous by the desperate, distant voice that repeatedly screams, "G.I. -- f*ck you!" is an unremarkable spaghetti Eastern gone , while both and -- two slow-rolling percussion exercises -- have the same type of paranoid and pensive qualities heard on . The second half sees the group as -style percussionists, fashioning instruments from scraps of sheet metal and battering and scraping them into hypnotic but occasionally tedious pieces. is particularly lulling and fragile; at the other end of the spectrum, there's a startling minute of frenetic rattling. The layers with which the separate tracks are made are several, and the fact that each one was recorded live is extremely impressive, though the results aren't nearly as engaging as the group's avant- material. [The version of the album adds both sides of the 12" singles.] ~ Andy Kellman