Bowery Electric's "Lushlife" is almost a great album. I can't even call it a Verve Release, because there's not enough excellent material on it to warrant that label. But the intended results -- or at least, what I will assume they were trying to record -- are genius, yet overall, the album suffers from average execution at best.

In 1997, BE made "Beat", which is one of the many albums that was hailed as "what MBV might/should have recorded as the follow-up to Loveless". And in fact, the magnificent singles more than live up to that sort of praise. With its lurching tempo and shimmery chord sequence, "Empty Words" borrows considerably from MBV's "Slow", but strips aside the latters' gruff demeanor. If "Slow" is a crude sexual fantasy, then "Empty Words" is a considerably more innocent daydream on a humid day. "Fear of Flying" foreshadows what was to come with "Lushlife", with its looped drum break over another huge two-chord epiphany. I'm deliberately avoiding using all the tired cliched descriptions of hazy swirling wall of sound guitar gauze noise, but believe me, they ALL apply here. And they're more appropriate here than in 99% of the existing cases.

But despite all that, "Beat" isn't really a guitar album. It's an ambient drone album. Much of it is beatless (pardon the pun), and the parts that aren't have the (looped) percussion far back in the mix. If there's a touchstone for what was to come on "Lushlife", it's the title-track, with crackly hip-hop beat, this and chunky bassline, breathy, monotone vocals. and almost no guitar effects to speak of. It's also the opening track, and since little else on the album sounds like this, it comes off as a disjointed overture before the "real" album hits.

"Lushlife" sought to expand this overture into a full-blown album. It would be creeped-out and claustrophobic, something like cLOUDDEAD but insert Martha Schwendener's soft vocals instead of whatever they do that passes for rapping. Imagine basslines which completely swamp the mix and threaten to explode your headphones. They'd construct a wall of sound out of rhythms, dispense with guitar almost completely, and let the singing purr you to sleep. And the nighttime cityscape on the cover is the perfect prelude for all of this -- brooding, foreboding, and luminescent.

What happened? The beats feel too well-worn, too familiar, and too basic. Sure, the Funky Drummer Break and the Paid in Full Break are classics, but they've been used so many times that the excitement of hearing them is distressingly low. They are almost boring these days. "Floating World" and "Lushlife" are massive enough, but several other tracks offer interchangeable and unmemorable rhythms that ought to have catalogue numbers called Generic Hip Hop Beat #14A on a sample CD. The vocals do sound lovely, but are mainly drab and monotone. Sure, the opener of "Beat" featured this sort of singing, but that was only one track, not most of an album's worth. Even after several listens, I can recall almost no vocal melodies from this album. The scarcity of guitar is actually immaterial, but its absence does require something to fill that space -- I want a thundering and original beat quaking over shuddering synths, not just hip hop beats used for an indie hipness factor.

What went right? As I mentioned, the opening two tracks largely fulfilled their ambitions. "Freedom Fighter" uses a truly rocking break reminiscent of "Straight Outta Compton" together with a forceful and doom-laden vocal that recalls the more blistering moments of Curve's album "Cuckoo". A great choice for the single. And the closing "Passages" is a powerful piece of music stripped to its threadbare essentials, using a beat (the "Paid In Full" break, yeah, I said it was well-worn before but I've always been a sucker for it and it fits shockingly well here), two eerie chords (note: Bowery Electric should use only two chords as much as possible), and Schwedener's ghostly delivery to create a wonderfully unsettling piece of dance music. If nothing else, they did succeed in making a solid last impression with this finish to the album.