People like disco. It's a funny word. Most of us just associate it with a favorably slender John Travolta and cocaine. But some of us like disco more than others some of us used the router to carve the word "disco" into a piece of wood in sixth grade shop class. Tjinder Singh and Ben Ayres, who you probably fondly remember from the 80's sitcom "My Two Dads," or if you tend to remember things that actually did happen the Brit Indo Funk Pop outfit, Cornershop. Hence, we get Clinton. It's Cornershop, more or less, but with more disco. (Yeah, I know.)

Most everything you'd expect from Cornershop pops up somewhere on Disco and the Halfway to Discontent. You get your guitars, sitars, and Singh's tasty subcontinental breakfast of a voice. But you also get slapped with a dosage of bad opium. Robot voices, beats that will put another crack in your rear, more robot voices telling us that "we wanna get it on," clapping, and something that sounds kinda like the post Milli Vanilli project, Rob and Fab, on "Welcome to Tokio, Otis Clay." The album's amazingly nonsensical lyrics might have been intended as some sort of social criticism of the dance music world, and end up just plain funny. Look at that lyric sheet "You are like candy to our combinations of Pee Pee mathematics."

For the majority of its duration, Disco merely simmers when it should be sizzling. The general rule for this disc is, if you don't like what you hear in the first 30 seconds which is going to be a lot of the time you're not gonna like the rest. Some tracks are comatose, others are dead on arrival. Clinton works best when Singh stays on his feet long enough to lay down his vocals and the beats aren't smothered by the overzealous synth nanny. Disco has got a handful of bright spots, and brimful of rough edges. Likable elements of Cornershop persevere, while funk marinates them in its inescapable juices.

Bottom line: you can count Disco's good tracks on one severely mutilated hand.

-Beatty & Garrett