Led by veteran Brit club spinner and guitarist Justin Robertson, Lionrock are a DJ-band hybrid that are willing to try just about anything to keep bodies moving. Their second full-length, City Delirious, is acid house (the euphoric, chemically enhanced techno offshoot that Robertson cut his teeth on) gone guitar rock – a rhythmically relentless party album that offsets big-beat bravado with sharp-edged techno trances, bright house workouts and midtempo reggae steadiness. With its warped soul breaks and horn punches, "Scatter and Swing" sounds like digitally processed boogaloo. "A Cellar Full of Noise" goes for a complete guitar psych-out over snapping drums, while "Rude Boy Rock" keeps things nice and simple with a buoyant, cut-and-paste rock-steady session.

Holding it all together is the sense that Lionrock actually had fun concocting the live and sampled collages on City Delirious – so much so that the album's vocals seem superfluous. The tracks that feature the lackluster rhymes of MC Buzz B just get in the way of instrumental cuts such as "Zip Gun Rumble." "Rumble" starts off as just another piece of Bond-inspired lounge nostalgia, then becomes an explosive Sixties TV theme gone haywire: squealing surf guitars, stomping beach-party beats, crashing cymbals and, just to remind us of Lionrock's roots, looped electronic splashes that evaporate in the air. (RS 789)

JOSH KUN