BLACK BOX RECORDER

THE FACTS OF LIFE

Jetset

Also overeducated, underemployed and terminally British: Auteurs, Pulp, The Smiths, Blur's Parklife

These carefully polished pop songs gleefully kick the final nail into the coffin of any imperial greatness English life might still claim. Black Box Recorder, brainchild of Auteurs mastermind Luke Haines, has devised the anti-Britpop. Singer Sarah Nixey breathes disingenuously dulcet life into Haines' smart (and smart-ass) lyrics, which often parody the instructional tone of schoolbooks and government pamphlets. In "The English Motorway System," a benumbed travelogue satirizing the overenthusiasm of the Cool Britannia tourism board, Nixey languorously lies: "It's been there forever/ It's never going to change." The same false reassurance appears on the title track, a wickedly subverted sex-ed manual for prepubescents. The "Straight Life" offers a disturbingly sunny encyclopedia of suburban bourgeois conventions. "Start as You Mean to Go On" closes the album with this bilious advice: "Don't forget to pay the premiums/ Go abroad and leave the gas on." A witty, Wildean work detailing the peculiarly English marriage of self-loathing and nostalgia, The Facts of Life demands a home--between Never Mind the Bollocks and The Queen is Dead--in any Anglophilic/phobic record collection. Christopher McQuain

SPEEDY J

A SHOCKING HOBBY

Mute/Novamute

Fellow romper stompers: Aphex Twin, µu-ziq, Panacea, Squarepusher

Mechanical maestro Speedy J (a.k.a. Jochem Paap) started out like every other techno geek: by bunkering himself in his bedroom and duplicating the chill grooves of his fave club traxx. But 1997's Public Energy No. 1 revealed Paap's new mutant face. Gone was the slippery, Detroit-inspired sheen of his early work, replaced by abrasive drill'n'bass noisescapes, redlined synths and flatulent industrial-funk rhythms. Hobby, while not as brazen as PE#1, continues the assault. "Borax" bites into rhythms that explode like sticks of dynamite rigged into your speaker lining. "Ferber Mudd" and "Balk Acid" shoot prismatic keyboards into a dark vacuum. "Drill" hovers and buzzes like a helicopter over a Thunderdome drum circle, then "Caligula" slides from its cycling, sinister hum into the distorted pneumatic blasts of "Vopak." "Actor Nine" strides in with acid basslines squelching under warehouse-leveling percussion slams and the sound of deteriorating machinery. A distant gong and the clack of some malfunctioning robot greet Aphex Twin's ambient drifts in "Sabina Seat." "Amoco Cadiz" metes out martial beats over seething, synth-mutated horns. And finally, "Manhasset" closes Paap's latest chapter with the mournful, echoing plunk of layered pianos. As the last key fades away, A Shocking Hobby's terrible grip on your mind lightens, leaving you trapped in the even more terrifying present--left to wait until Speedy J graces us with another visit. Don't wait too long, eh, J? John Graham