Cabbageboy has not come to allay our fears of a cyborg future. He hasn't come to shout "Cease!" at scientists shoving microchips and transmitters into their forearms. Damnit, he hasn't even come to give prophetic pronouncements about Frankenfood, those too-shiny, omni-resistant Granny Smiths and Brussel sprouts the FDA recently approved under a well-baksheeshed agreement with Archers Daniels Midland.

Nope, Si Begg's Cabbageboy project is here to provide slightly silly downtempo funk for slightly silly Sundays and witching hour bong hits. "R and B Angus Steakhouse" is based upon a single sample of some drunk Lancashire lad bangin' on about a cheesy Northern English club that he compares to a British chain of steak joints. Believe me, if I were the owner of the club so critiqued, I'd close down and set up a small hardware store forthwith. Begg fills out the sample with crunchy beats and sloppy basslines that always err towards the chewiness of the rubbery flesh served at Angus, but never fully succumb.

"Donkey Kong" imagines a Coleco world of teens screeching in unison as some pixilated meanie stomps after them with distended objects of light destruction. Begg, I think, is not making any point about how our kid siblings choose to entertain themselves. No, he's enjoying being a hyperglycemic Cornelius for a spell.

Begg's irreverence carries on apace with "Hey Hey We're the Monks," which, rather than being a tribute to the superlative 60's ready-made TV band, is a total piss-take of Enigma (and all the other new age dreck homeowners feel the urge to afflict upon their rent-paying guests). Begg, however, doesn't leave us with the empty echoes of laughter. Instead, he uses the song as a platform to prove that he's sufficiently adept at laying down tracks that never outstay their welcome.

Another case in point is "Talk Show." Midway through, the demonic, Oprah-sampling bass- flatulation becomes a Consolidated-style patchwork of samples upholding the right to free speech and DMX's right to rap about ripping a fellow's head off and pissing down into the spouting, gory orifice. On the mixing desk of a slack, cash-hungry producer, "Talk Show" would have become extremely tiresome and heavily polemical. But Begg's got the knack of leavening his politics with bathetic humor. He closes the track with a sample of harmless BBC Radio 1 "personality" Mark Goodier asking whether you like [the London] Suede, because he thinks that they're-- ready for this insight?-- "really nice."

Genetically Modified won't protect from bacterial invasion, nor will it ward off the ills of society, but Si Begg's lil' Pokémon self might just make you smile a little more and frown a little less. There's a stern lesson in here for way too many of us.

-Paul Cooper