At Nuggets, a new/used record store in Boston, there's a bin by the front counter containing cassette "grab bags." For a buck or two, you get a stapled brown paper sack with six or seven tapes inside. The idea, of course, is that you don't know what you're getting, and it's cheap, so you can afford to take the chance of receiving a tasty surprise (say, an old Funkadelic album, or some pre-reissue Pink Floyd) or a heap of diseased, decomposing dung (think Styx's Greatest Hits or a couple of copies of Vanilla Ice's To the Extreme). At least they label the bags with a vague genre categorization.

Label compilations are much the same as these grab bags in both concept and execution. Rare is the label compilation of consistent, high quality material, worth listening to as a stand-alone album. And sadly, Just Another Taste of Electronic Watusi Boogaloo is no exception to the rule.

According to the press release, we're supposed to be witnessing nothing short of a revolution in modern club electronica by listening to this record. Well, you know, we all want to change the world. How exactly these folks mean to do this is a mystery to me, because pretty much everything here is something I've either heard before or could have easily imagined. It's pretty much your standard mix of not-too-wild, largely sampled beats, speech snippets, funky bass, and good old-fashioned repetition.

Most of the standout tracks on Just Another Taste are contributed by Mains Ignition, who I would definitely invite to any party I'd throw. (That is, if I hadn't the limbular coordination of a beached jellyfish.) They're the most firmly focused on getting up to get down, and the most successful at getting the party people to "put their hands in the ay-uh," as they say. "Testify" kicks off the compilation with straightforward funk-blues mingling with sweeping synths. As a bonus, an actual catchy melody has been thrown in for good measure. "In HQ (Intelligent High Quality)" adds some water-drip sounds to the same decent grooves, and "Wholesale Physics Depot" switches over to a more acid-jazz mode, including an intermittent flirtation with the bogeyman techno mothers warn their techno children about.

The rest? To say it's forgettable would be a terrible understatement. On "Deep Throat," Oh Polo employs the age-old technique of incorporating samples from '70s British porn to spice things up. Sadly, they also offer Just Another Taste's absolute nadir: the reggae-tweaked, Victrolafied hip-hop snooze-fest "Compared to Ramone." Yay, it's the exact same, unchanging groove over and over again! If I were on the dance floor and this came busting out of the speakers, I'd find the nearest bench, post-haste, no matter how much E I'd downed.

Biowire's "Fantasize" sounds like a techno take on Steve Reich. But instead of becoming gradually more fascinating as the song builds, it swirls noxiously and peters out. Finally, Babalu-- the name of the club where much of this mediocrity takes place, as well as this group's band name-- gives us the positively annoying "Skins," which boils down to bad poetry recited badly over bad dance music. Did I mention it's bad? They also present us with the interest-dissolving "Happiness," a 10 minute-long Dorian vamp boasting a delayed electric piano solo.

If I were just picking this up on impulse for a couple of bucks along with something else I knew to be good, I wouldn't be overly put off. After all, there are a handful of tracks here that, in addition to making me want to get up offa that thing, offer sonic interest as well. The real problem here doesn't lie with the quality of the record, since, as we've already gone over, label comps are generally a roll-of-the- dice affair. However, U.S. distributors Kindercore are charging full price for this grab bag. And regardless of whether or not it's foolish to charge $12 for other compilations, it certainly is here.

-Craig Griffith