Two Lone Swordsmen have never been less than shrewd predators. Just like the spider's web, their strategy for securing prey is utterly elegant and jaw-droppingly efficient. Rather than churning out remix after remix like Timo Maas or Junior Vasquez, they spin their unique style, take cover, and wait for us to pass by and become entangled in their sticky electro funk.

This isn't to say that the duo are indolent scruffs. They rapidly followed up last year's liquid Stay Down with the avant hip-hop of A Virus with Shoes. They reconstructed Paul Weller's "Heliocentric," as well as taking a manky squeegee mop to St Etienne's "Heart Failed." They haven't pandered to hard house or courted the self-infantilizing day-glo trance massive. Their vision is fixed and no one can distract them from it. "Cotton Stains" capitalizes on the elastic properties of that drum-n-bass staple, the bassline wobbler, by bouncing flecks of sound off its bucking back. "Machine Maid" reminds us just how downright gorgeous unfiltered electro-boogie can be.

As a dispatch to the two-step messengers, "Akwalek" merges a minus-28'd UK garage rhythm with Eno/Lanois ambient guitar. The bubbling percussion caresses as much as it urges you to get down. The tiny reminders of the album's title (there are three of them, in increasingly ornate sophistication) are dense packets of hypermolecules, bearing superficial resemblance to entire Chain Reaction albums, or any number of Stefan Betke's fuzzed-out dub sessions. These congregations of ill vapors cleanse the palette between the thoroughly filthy electro of the other 16 tracks here.

Two Lone Swordsmen shape electro and post-punk disco as Henry Moore sculpted the human form. Weatherall's abstract beats are as curvy as they are playful, as precise as they are liberated. Because Weatherall doesn't give props to an erroneously hierarchical tradition, he incorporates whatever he chooses into his tracks. And rather than finding an ancient instructional LP or sampling a stinky b-movie, Weatherall and Tenniswood craft their own twisted sounds and uniquely freaky beats, and thereby give permanence to an inherently vapid genre. By grafting the art house experimentation of Krautrockers Neu! and Can onto post-punk disco, the Two Lone Swordsmen are stoking up the same fires that Liquid Liquid, ESG, Dinosaur L, and (before them all) Cymande ignited years ago. Bet the bastards can hold their own in a punch-up an'all!

-Paul Cooper