The industrial dance trio Ethyl Meatplow emerged from Los Angeles' modern primitive scene, where body piercing, tribal tattoos and torture are club staples. Like that lifestyle, the group's debut album, Happy Days, Sweetheart, can be painful at times. Its erotic appeal disarms you so its sadistic side can whip you into a quivering mass of submission. The group has a boundaryless appetite for pleasure; regardless of your gender, the Meatplows just want to sex you up.

Listening to Happy Days is like walking into a foreign red-light district. Steam rises off the throaty vocals and femme-empowering screams of Garbo-esque singer Carla Bozulich, as her freaky partner, the wiry skinhead John Napier, counters with an evil, Fred Schneider-like sing-speak. Although their vocal styles are polar opposites, at times it's almost impossible to tell who's singing; it's as if they had bonded on some primal level.

The guitarless music is a rapture of sinful samples, writhing keyboards and tribal-to-processed dance beats. Bozulich rolls obscenities off her tongue over grating industrial noise – clanging metal pipes and whirring machinery. However, there's also some surprisingly inviting melodies, as in the anti-crack song "Devil's Johnson" or the sleepy "Ripened Peach," in which violins blend with downright pretty harmonies.

But the band isn't always up to entertaining. Although its sinister performance of the Carpenters' "Close to You," complete with string arrangements, is funny, it lacks musical bite. As with other songs, the music collapses under the carnal intensity of the vocals.

Unfortunately, Ethyl Meatplow ends Happy Days with an assault of grating noise that sounds more like seventh-grade metal shop than an avant-garde experiment. But images of perverse junior-high shop teachers still don't sour this alluring smorgasbord of unbridled lust and dance-floor fun. (RS 664)

LORRAINE ALI