For Your Ears Only

Formerly on the Skint label famous for giving the world Fatboy Slim (er . . . thanks?) and spawning the big-beat movement, BRA (guffaw) have less in common with Mr Slim's easy, stoopid, populist thrills than with the cut-and-paste aesthetic of wacky party-flavoured cacophony you'd associate with Cornelius or former collaborators Beastie Boys. They are the South Park to Fatboy's Friends, if you like.

Having said that, For Your Ears Only, their second album, sounds like nothing so much as being dragged backwards through a Terry Gilliam movie. Twice. On meths.

There may not be a happy sound left in this world that has not put in a gleefully hallucinatory appearance here. Brighton Pier ballroom tunes, squawkbox vocals and cartoon Hawaiian lap steel collide, giggling incoherently, with two-tone, adrenalin-injection breakbeats, arcade-game melodies (as in the amazing 'Theme From Gutbuster') and all manner of keyboard-you-found-in-a-skip squelching. In a particularly deranged moment, breathy string samples on 'Busyness Man's Lunch' add gravitas to a vocal that can only be described as the sound of a castrato being squeezed.

Dense with insane, rollicking noise, the album careers exuberantly past you at stonking top speed, screaming and (literally) making farting noises, possibly on its way to Vegas with a suitcase full of drugs made from human pineal glands in the backseat.

So another triumph for the oldies, fact fans: half of Bentley Rhythm Ace, Fatboy-like, comes to us reincarnated from a past life in PWEI. Pop did eat itself, it seems, and is now giddily tummy-sick on too much ice cream, fizzy sherbet and peyote.