Every highly anticipated album deserves at least one support album to boost our expectations of how genre-defying and hot-damn epochal the headlining album is bound to be. Right now, the winner of the "the most anticipated cultural artifact since the synthesizing of the stay-crunchy Fruit Loop" trophy is, naturally Radiohead's Amnesiac. And as it happens, Amnesiac has a support album: Air's 10,000 Hz Legend, which itself had a support album, the Moon Safari-meets-Terry Callier, Simple Things by British Air-o-philes, Zero 7.

In the sweaty, snobby world of dance music, no album bates more breath than Basement Jaxx's Rooty. Rooty's predecessor, Remedy, made the two Jaxx a bazillion pounds and they scooped praise from Dave Morales, DJ Sneak, Daft Punk, even my headbanger nephew, who previously got his rocks off to Sepultura. Exactly what it is about the Benetton house of Remedy that turned him from Paraguayan doom-rock has always eluded me.

Nothing, however, eludes me about Organic Audio's second album, Last One Home. It's a no-nonsense good-time-guaranteed-for-all party-in-a-five-inch-platter. The bonus is that it'll definitely thwart the attack of the Rooty munchies.

Last One Home kicks off in trademark Basement Jaxx territory with "Play to the Music," which heavily echoes Remedy's "Red Alert." The track bucks more than a hippie-stuffed VW minivan on a desert road and abounds in much more than just a flourishing, vaguely Andalusian guitar for its campy kicks.

"This could really happen" visits the unpredicted clash between Basement Jaxx and Exit Planet Dust-era Chemical Brothers. The below-the-bollocks bass licks upwards between the horn stabs and the twisted forms of dancers driven to lascivious levels of phreakin'. "Good to Go" reminds me of nothing more than Black Legend's Barry White sound-a-likey, "You See the Trouble with Me," as remixed by an utterly crunked DJ Sneak.

The title track takes us away from the nightclubs of London to the Shrine, the infamous Nigerian boîte where Fela Kuti would lay down junta-baiting grooves to the manifest delight of his audience. Though Organic Audio's perfectly quantized horn blasts don't have the ineffable precision of Africa 70's, the band get Fela's $4 reedy organ sound down superbly. Unfortunately, the track is allowed to extend into the 16 minutes that Fela would have stretched it, so it never develops and beckons us into paying a huge amount of attention to anything but its unimpeachable, if brief funk.

Organic Audio once again showcase their Latin selves during the timbale-rocking, manically maraca'd "Florettas Horns." Just as during "This Could Really Happen," it's the bass that pulls some tax-bracket-breaking overtime to become the ground upon which all manner of infectious ersatz-analog synth squiggles and percussion delicacies (talking drums, cowbells, whistles-- the tuned hubcaps from Chuck D's '98 Oldsmobile purchased for a song at Yo-Hooptieez.com) prance until the playtime bell is regrettably rung. Organic Audio drag out their undisguised mastery of the Basement Jaxx sound during "Nurega," a track so poo-poo-grabbing that even mopey Elliott Smith couldn't resist lolloping his sullen indie kid frame around a strobe-striated club to it.

Last One Home closes in restraint and with more than an appreciative nod to Tim "Love" Lee, the boss of Organic Audio's UK home, Tummy Touch. Though the 4/4 beats are all present and correct, the main feature of "Always the Sun" is a plaintive dobro that recalls Tim "Love" Lee's "Go Down Dixie"-- the weepy close to his Just Call Me Lone Lee. I'm reminded also of the mid-section of the Orb's "Little Fluffy Clouds" when the dobro arpeggios in a very Pat Metheny Electric Counterpoint way.

Though Last One Home is undoubtedly pitching itself toward the Basement Jaxx audience, it does so from a far more groove-reliant angle. Basement Jaxx, for me, have a canny pop sensibility which Last One Home masks with more underground DJ-friendly trackiness. I can't imagine MTV's DJ Skribble passing over Rooty's "Romeo" to get to "Nurega"-- which is a hearty recommendation in itself. For the status-conscious amongst us out there, Last One Home is the style-snob's elegant slumming-it with the pop-munching masses. For the rest of us, Last One Home skillfully overshadows its self-confident, sloppy headlining album.

-Paul Cooper