Damn, this shit is ugly. We're talking a hungover Liza Minelli, nude, sans makeup, reclining on a rust-brown vinyl couch pocked with cigarette burns, eating handfuls of Vienna sausages out of a salad bowl. That image, translated into a feeling, is an Ibiza Anthem. And Bogdan Raczynski has five such anthems on this EP.

Still, music is a mirror and sometimes we look like shit, no? As long as the reflection is rendered with skill and tells us something about ourselves, we can learn from the filth. With this in mind, this EP is a moderate success. Raczynski scores the most points with his churning but disciplined electronic percussion, which constantly threatens to degenerate into chaos while somehow keeping beat. His shortcoming here is that he fails to generate enough fresh, original sounds.

"Imperialist Takeover" is the biggest exception to this weakness-- the processed organ grinder that constitutes the melody is instantly haunting-- and the neo-electro groove is the most conventional. "Bombs over Ibiza" builds something approaching a melody out of three overlapping voices (two shrieking rejects from Alvin's Chipmunks and one out-of-tune guy with a speech impediment), and weaves the grating melody through video game sound effects and Panacea-style drum samples. "Death to the Natives" is convulsive, overdriven jungle, while "Trance and Burn" features Wax Trax screams of agony over squiggly synths and flailing beats.

As you can see from the song titles, there appears to be some kind of political angle to this EP, but I'm not buying it. This rage is not against the machine, but the man in the mirror, and while you have to hate yourself a little to really enjoy music this bleak, it's nice to know that someone's making it.

-Mark Richard-San