Steve Stoll spent some time in the armed forces and even had a stint in the Persian Gulf, which means there was at least one jarhead who wasn't listening to Van Halen when he bombed the Iraqi's back to the stone age. Stoll's jones is dance- oriented techno in its most rudimentary form, built with tools that have been around since we started sending advisors to El Salvador. He uses these implements to craft The Blunted Boy Wonder, a minimalist album which proves that, alas, sometimes less is less.

Stoll strips the music down to it's essence-- no melody lines, no new sounds, nothing but pure rhythm. Combining house elements (a muted four- on- the- floor bass kick, hand claps) with the vocabulary of pure Detroit techno, Stoll aims for something that'll work on the dance floor. He succeeds there to a degree: this is a generic (and not terribly funky) form of the music that's been playing in clubs and warehouses since time immemorial. But outside of that venue I can't find much use for the album.

Which is not to say that the music is completely without merit; here and there Stoll gets into the groove and proves his love to me. Both the opening "Drop Zone" and "Reciproheat" build piece by piece and have nice modulations where the various rhythm tracks interact and you notice that the sound before or the sound after can have so much effect on the sound in between. Exploring these relationships is the most interesting thing about the album by far, but unfortunately most of the tracks are too short to fully dissect the pulse. There's some decent raw material on Boy Wonder, so my advice is to look for the 12-inch remixes at your local indie record shop. And if you don't have a turntable... well, you won't miss out if you skip The Blunted Boy Wonder.

-Mark Richard-San