It's difficult being a member of the Warp camp, I'd imagine. Music press the world over would have you automatically pegged as "intelligent dance music." You can almost imagine the collective cartoon bubbles appearing above music journalists' heads when Warp is mentioned: musical alchemists, pretentious arseholes, self-consciously strange lads, bedroom boffins, chin-strokers par excellence. It's almost as if nothing you could release as a Warp artist could ever be considered poor. Just "experimental." Nor could it be considered particularly groundbreaking, because, well... whatever you do is expected to induce a lot of head-scratching and very little bum-waving.

A quick listen to a handful of Two Lone Swordsmen releases might have the neophyte writing them off as "self-consciously strange lads" were it not for the men involved. Yeah, guys, Andrew Weatherall and Keith Tenniswood's names cast long, if spotty, shadows on modern music. Some would say their credentials make anything they're involved with worth listening to. I wouldn't go that far, but it's true that a lot of what they've put out would have received a muted response (if any) were it not attached to their moniker and the famed electronic label they record for.

Two Lone Swordsmen have a lot of character, though. Their sound has a playful, in-jokey sort of levity that has also characterized fellow madcap ambient-electronic auteurs the Orb (whom Weatherall has often remixed and worked with). You almost get the idea that their obscure song titles ("Brother Foster Through the Phones," "Cloned Christ on a Hover Donkey [Be Thankful]") are not random at all, but in fact tied to some shared joke between which is no doubt utterly hilarious "if you were there."

It's just one of the elements that make up a project which, for the most part, consists of two guys making music for themselves and having a good time with it. Some would say good music is always made with an audience in mind, lest it be impersonal and without significant weight. However, music made with an audience in mind also has the conspicuous additional baggage of being aimed at a demographic; albums may be cut down or edited in keeping with possible audience reaction, at the expense of the artist's vision. Weatherall and Tenniswood don't seem to give a good goddamn about demographics or audience perception, and it's unsure as to whether even the most devoted Richard D. James-obsessed Warpite would find much to latch on to, here.

The songs don't differ too much from each other, although if pressed, I'd probably say that the subtly menacing "Our Kid's Berwick" would be the best of the bunch. There's a sort of cohesiveness to the whole affair that's a breath of fresh air compared to older releases by these fellows, just as last year's lovely Stay Down full-length seemed tied to some manner of "underwater" concept. It almost gives you the impression the bastards really know what they're doing now.

If these two had a formula (and this is stretching it), it would be this: first, ready an arsenal of wobbly sounds, all set to cause various degrees of uneasiness in the listener. Drop some deceptively simple slow beats into the mix of wobbly sounds, which are now shooting about in some sort of warped, angular, methodical groove. Sprinkle odd washes of background ambiance and spoken word bits in there. Occasionally power this concoction with a rubbery woofer-pummeling bassline.

This probably sounds interesting to many of you, and by and large, it is. However, one gets the feeling that an "EP" like this (it's album length, for sure) could be churned out once a week without much sweat. These guys are in control of their gear, and their sounds, but perhaps not their collective noggins. A little quality control could go a long way to cleaning up their releases, and though the anything-goes aesthetic is endearing at times, there are definitely times when you wish you didn't feel like skipping to the next track so damned often.

In a time with so many balls-and-all electronic albums which, some claim, have something for everyone, this is an album which has a whole lot of something for a particularly odd sort of person. I guess that person could be described as "a Two Lone Swordsmen fan." Maybe they're aiming at a demographic after all.

-Dan Gardopee