Though Quentin Dupieux (aka Mr. Oizo) is an award-winning French video director, you'll detect no hints of Serge Gainsbourg or Jean-Luc Goddard on Analog Worms Attack. And while I feel generally worn out by the formula of French house music's filtered disco bass loop and ripped drum programming, I can get quite roused by Dupieux's spiky, creeping, downright disfigured grooves.

Daft Punk, Cassius, Alex Gopher-- none of these make me want to spin around deliriously and prance about like a prize arse. French house, until now, reached a peak with St. Germain's Boulevard, a seductive blend of house and jazz, and a composite of the Paradise Garage and the Village Vanguard. Though St. Germain's Ludovic Navarre claims that he dislikes going out to clubs, Boulevard revels in the nightlife. Mr. Oizo (pronounced "Wazzo") also digs the wee small hours. But where Navarre celebrates the high life and gentle sophistication, Dupieux threatens with urban myths from the sewer. His Analog Worms come out long after dusk and lick your dreaming face with psylocybin tongues.

Oizo's beats are the wounded and the crippled ones that every other house producer has rejected. Released from the beatbox of the abandoned, these beats are so off-kilter that they verge on arrhythmia. Yet, they limp along with such determination that they eventually form a steady pattern. But often as not, it's the clanks and the stabs of bruised white noise that provide the anchor for each track. In this regard, you can comfortably compare Analog Worms Attack with Jake Mandell's weirdtronic masterpiece, Parallel Processes.

Of course, Oizo's technique could lead Analog Worms Attack into art-house territory. Happily, this is not the case. Instead, the album's playfulness and b-boyishness encourages DJ Feadz to wreck a deck or two. Oizo, like the b-boys of yore, finds euphony in the cracked and the corrupt. Though "Inside the Kidney Machine" whirs and stutters spasmodically, it'd prove irresistible to tracksuited suburban kids just learning to windmill.

Appreciated as a whole, the bizarre beauty of Analog Worms Attack comes from the interbreeding of crunches and the chromosomal plasticity of beats. Early tracks sound like parents to later ones, and, quite murkily, these offspring tracks breed with each other to produce further diseased mutations. Their distortions are a direct result of Oizo's Dr. Moreau-ish intent to pollute the gene pool of French house. He should be given another award immediately.

-Paul Cooper