Salaryman make music for car commercials. Surprisingly, this isn't meant as an insult; think of all the bands you know that have lent their music to car commercials in the last few years-- Spiritualized, Velocity Girl, Stereolab, Gus Gus, Spacehog, Propellerheads, the Orb, Fatboy Slim, and Nick Drake, to name just a few. That's not such bad company to keep. Indeed, any track off Karoshi would be great background music for Mitsubishis driving through billows of manhole steam and shallow, digitally-edited pools of water in sleek, glittering cities at dusk.

Problem is, car commercials are pretty much the only place where Karoshi would sound good. Just like their alter egos, the Poster Children, Salaryman's musical style is better suited to short bursts than to regulation-length songs. They have a knack for creating good hooks through simple mediums-- a keyboard stab, a drum roll, a two-note guitar riff, and a divebombing bass line. But they also have an unfortunate tendency to try stretching these hooks out over more than three minutes at a time, and it rarely works.

The first half of Karoshi stays mostly afloat, with appealingly dark atmospherics, snarling keyboards, and propelling drumbeats that prominently bring to mind Trans Am (both the band and the car). But a few deadly-slow slogs, along with a pallid Latin Playboys imitation ("Taco Muerte") and a tinny, jokey exercise in synth-funk ("My Dog Has Fleas"), sink the album on the whole.

So if Salaryman play music that is, for the most part, instrumental and best enjoyed in 30-second sound bytes, why aren't they earning big bucks writing ad jingles? Oh, that's right, they're really just indie rockers who don't want to let their synth fetish get in the way of their real band. Add to that the usual bonus multimedia toys that Salaryman and the Poster Children have tossed in with their last few discs, and what do you have? A very adequately- executed side project.

-Nick Mirov