Noise annoys, or so claimed the Buzzcocks. Does 2nd Gen's Wajid Yaseen agree? Well, though his debut album, Irony Is, is a riled-up torrent of white noise, distortion and cyberpunk hip-hop, it's hardly annoying. Annoying is waiting 15 minutes in a coffeeshop for some prat to explain how many shots of walnut syrup he wants in his decaf, 2%, pro-choice, PETA-benefiting frothachino. Annoying is waking up to yet another imbecile politician spouting crap about peace processes, presidential pardons, and Puffy's professions of innocence.

Irony Is is in tune with our fractured times. Beginning with the raucous Techno Animal'd single "And/Or," Irony Is gives diversity a wide berth and maintains a strict no-pop-fluff policy. "Buried," true to its title, inters us deep into the chthonic soil. Meanwhile, "Slowburn" offers possibly unintentional comic relief as guest ranter Mau, formerly of Portishead hopefuls Earthling and now resident ranter of Dirty Beatniks, describes how he plans to smash his face through his own skull, pour the resulting fleshy slurry into a fish bowl, and offer it to a beautiful girl. Whether Mau is just being ironic, or actually intends for "Slowburn" to serve as an homage to the suicidal side of Slayer is not wholly clear.

The terrorizing "Black Spring" bounds forth from the bittersweet snarls of a blues harmonica and a bottleneck slide guitar, and as such represents the furthest reach of Irony Is. But brief as these Delta signifiers are (they're soon overcome by a posse of unrestrained hooligan beats), they do provide moderate respite. "Vurt" lives up to its Jeff Noon illbient Manc-dub archetype and seriously contends for a place on the next Electric Ladyland compilation from Mille Plateaux. The track's drilling melody weaves around a tinny drum machine and courses, narcotically, into our systems. A delicate Vurt feather trip this is definitely not.

"Musicians are Morons" returns to a more K-Mart/Godfleshy template as collapsing-structure guitars engage Atari Teenage Riot beats in an anime battle; it nightmarishly results in making the sparse, Mogodon-drenched "Scarred" that much more intense, foreboding, and frighteningly like a super psychopathic Pan Sonic track. "Measurement 9" comes on rapidly like the waking-corpse cousin of "Gates to Film City," Future Pilot AKA's collaboration with Two Lone Swordsmen. The strings, mixed so quietly as to be nearly imperceptibility, provide a tweaking movement that chides the hefty 900-pound gorilla rhythms that stumble around them. And lest we get the impression that Wajid Yaseen can't be nimble, "Schism" takes Panacea's brand of dark drone-n-bass and sprites it up for the Ritalin nation.

Irony Is closes with the title track and, up until now, Yaseen has neglected to spotlight his bass skills, no doubt perfected when he was a member of bhangra agit-proppers, Fun^Da^Mental. As the bassline fuses with anything it comes in contact with, the track contorts into evermore disgusting chimeras of sound. It's the ego-matrix-shattering track that Chris Cunningham has been banking on Richard D. James coming up with.

Though I am thoroughly smitten with this debut, I would be remiss if I claimed any true degree of originality here. Like Speedy J, whose Mute-released corrosive A Shocking Hobby seems the blueprint for Irony Is, Wajid Yaseen proves himself a deft manipulator of parasitical sonics. If we're to read anything more than irony into his moniker, these ten cuts are just second generation copies of, amongst others, Techno Animal, Godflesh, Alec Empire and Panacea. Of course, since this style of crank-gear is based on disintegration and distortion, each new cycle of copying will introduce further levels of degradation and destruction. That, I believe, is Yaseen's intention. The duplicated glories of this twisted disc prove that we-- or Yaseen, for that matter-- have any grounds on which to be annoyed.

-Paul Cooper