Okay, picture this: you're the DJ at a rave, pleasantly spinning your newer- than- new, faster- than- faster breakbeat trancy hardcore dream pop, when somebody brings up this CD by a band called Cubanate and requests that you play a track. Grabbing a quick listen in your $260 platinum- lined headphones, you find a nice drum-n-bass type track and easily mix it in with the last gabber-core tune you were playing. Jim and Jane raver hop around while the somewhat darker bassline plays followed by the standard 170+ bpm drum loops-- then the vocals kick in, and Marc Heal's aggressive shouting scares all the kiddies off the dance floor. Now you've fucked up the sound that you were working on for the night and cleared the dance floor. But just when you think you've played your last gig for this production company, hundreds of rivetheads come out of the woodwork and start their own version of what a dance floor should look like.

You see, you've just thrown on a track by one of the few remaining true pioneers in an all by dying genre. (Well, dying by anything except German standards, where industrial music is still wildly successful.) Cubanate have just managed to throw you for a loop, no pun intended, by introducing themselves as another we- wanna- be- the- next- Chemical Brothers act before taking off their masks and letting you have it. Their music follows that exact ideal, combining the latest fashion in breakneck BPMs and ultra high- tech synth sounds found in any generic white- label techno music with fluttering speed guitar and piercing vocals. Thankfully, they manage to do this without bending too much in either direction, blissfully avoiding becoming either a pure drum-n-bass outfit or a speed metal band.

Purists of either discipline are likely to be disappointed by this album, and the above- mentioned scenario is based upon a true story, but the last Cubanate tour to come through town seemed to appeal equally to the raver kids and the industrialites. Cubanate seem to have scoped out the future and determined what it's going to sound like before it happens.

Interference is the band's fourth full- length, and it's signed for US distribution on the infamous Wax Trax/TVT label. Thankfully, the band hasn't gone completely unnoticed since their inception, and this serving dishes out production assistance from Rhys Fulber, formerly of Front Line Assembly. But had this technology and sound been available in the early 1990s heyday of Front Line Assembly, concert- goers probably would've creamed their pants in the pit, as the pace of the songs finally pushes over that threshold of "how do we make these songs even harder?"

-Skaht Hansen