It's convenient for me to think of the two rock- electronica hybrid genres big beat and post-rock as mirror images of one another. Big Beat DJs tend to use electronics to aspire toward the full force fury of rock records; their formats tend to be album- based rather than focused on producing singles, and they incorporate sampled rock instruments to fuel the fires rather than more abstract machine sounds. Purveyors of the revered "post-rock" genre, on the other hand, work toward foregoing the conventions of rock, creating heady cerebral music without the posturing and excess of most exploratory rock music.

Slick Sixty is one of those rare bands that makes these neat genre demarcations obsolete. Nibs and Nabs, the debut album from this Bristol- based trio of ex- pizza deliverymen, is chock full o' nuts to say the least. Their combination of fat, distorted rock guitar layered over incredibly infectious beats, trimmed with sick, inelegant scratchwork, and flavored with everything from trumpet and harmonica to subtle robo- vocals and Indian tabla is strikingly unique. The music is complex and totally unpretentious. And that's what makes it so goddamn good.

"Hillary, Last of the Pool Sharks" features seedy blues licks from the Keith Richards school that seem to lend the tune a bar- band feel that I've never heard in electronic music. The spooky theremin- soaked ambience of "Margo's B&B;" is shaken up by seriously impressive funk guitar that actually sounds great-- a rarity in electronic music-- because the guitar is clearly jamming with the electronics rather than lifted from elsewhere and sampled in. The band's sense of instrumentation never fails to create the tight proximity of live rock and roll, and this is why Nibs and Nabs seems perfectly at home behind a crowd: the complexity, while present, always serves a more overall immediate swagger. Even a repeat of the understated tune "The Wrestler" (it's a radio edit), which serves as the album's final track, doesn't do anything to upset the overall flow of the music.

To put it simply, Slick Sixty's blend of knob- tweaking bizarro electronic blips and bleeps, solid funk strumming, old- school hip-hop beats, killer scratch, interludes of abstract noise and the occasional chanted lyrical nonsense make Nibs and Nabs the perfect party album. If you've got friends who don't dig this, I say drop 'em.

-Brent S. Sirota