At the beginning of LL cool J's 1987 rap classic "I'm Bad," a police radio report warns officers to "look out for a tall, light-skinned brother with dimples." On "My Beatbox," a track on DeeJay Punk-Roc's debut album, ChickenEye, electronica's current objet d'hype revises that LL intro to his own hubristic specifications: a "mean motherfucker with dimples, carrying a black beatbox and a big dick." In fact, other than the album's opener, "I Hate Everybody," with its Quincy sound bites and blaring guitar, there isn't much about DeeJay Punk-Roc that is punk rock. He's the latest bigbeat sensation from the U.K., and with reason – his grooves are even more edgy and in-yer-face than those of his boogie brethren like Fatboy Slim.

In song after song, DeeJay Punk-Roc proves to be a new jack-of-all-trades: Hailing from Liverpool via Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, he charges the latest club sounds from both sides of the Atlantic with his own randy iconoclasm. His skittery scratching on "No Meaning" shows him to be a torrid turntablist; "Dedicated" is a strong dose of acid jazz. In "Far Out" and "All You Ladies," he pumps up the kind of "Planet Rock"– style electrofunk that would make Afrika Bambaataa proud. And throughout, Punk-Roc brings the noise; his (carefully) haphazard mix of dub effects, beefy rhythms and freaky-deaky sampledelica may be the dance-floor Molotov cocktail of '98. (RS 798)

MATT DIEHL