What a pity it is that the aluminum and polymers that make up CDs are so impervious to decomposition! What an irritating, hideous counterpoint to our disposable culture! When Philips announced CD technology, the marketing whizzes really made a huge deal about the longevity of the new format. Handled in compliance with the small-print paragraphs that used to appear in every CD booklet, your CD would incur negligible wear and tear. Apart from a single aberrant instance of CD mould occurring at a manufacturing plant that turned out CDs for such apocalyptic folk acts as Death in June and Current 93, Philips have not been proved wrong. CDs pretty much last forever.

The pity is that most music digitally transferred onto virgin aluminum does not deserve such permanence. CDs should be as prone to disintegration as paperback books. If this were the case, CDs such as Riton's debut release, Beats du Jour, would be adored and discarded with equal passion. But given the persistence of CD technology, every copy of Beats du Jour will long outstay its novelty and eventually become a storage problem for city refuse departments, retailers, and for anyone duped by Grand Central's marketing scheme.

Beats du Jour consummately lives up to its title. These are today's beats-- which really means some 70's funk, 80's electro, 90's digital editing technology, and 00's willingness to consume a whole lot of not very much. None of the twelve tracks here deviates from the expected. To some, that level of predictability and aversion to deviance will be appealing enough for them to buy this record in preference to, say, Chris Clark's Clarence Park.

Those of you who bought Clarence Park the moment after the scruffy oik who masquerades as a sales clerk desultorily lobbed it into the "P" bin will not be so drawn to Beats du Jour. Why? Because you've heard this record before. That is, you've heard all the elements before-- just not arranged in this exact order. "Take Control" is a G-rated version of Squarepusher's "My Red Hot Car" that will be comfortably, and without prospect of embarrassment, booming out from the speakers of your boss' Chrysler Sebring. Your boss will beam in that annoying "I may be in my forties, but I'm still a hep cat" manner because he will "be down wi'" the mellow guitar "licks" and Spread Love samples of "Departure." The DJ Premier beats and smoky jazz horns that constitute "Communicated" will provoke your boss into observing that the track is the great long lost Nightmares on Wax "dope jam" and should have been the defining Mo'Wax release. With absence in your eyes, you'll nod and recall the machine-gunning scenes in Billy Liar.

Riton proves he can ape not only Nightmares on Wax but also the Basement Jaxx style with "Initial Problem" and "Habib." The former is "Red Alert" politely glitched and reconstituted for non-GMO cook-outs in Martha's Vineyard; the latter blends the spunk punk energy of "Red Alert" with a few Sextent-ish clunks and some Jazzanova-style keys. "Motion" is a cyclon-vocalled electro track too elegant and silver-plumed for filthy breaks to even bother sending out a rejection slip on. The nimbly two-stepping "Frambuesa" will undoubtedly appear in Rainer Truby's sets-- it's contemporary enough (its UK garage beats are the poppier, more presentable Artful Dodger variety rather than DJ Zinc's alleyway skanks). To affect a more venerable and therefore so much more classy mien, the track leans back into Harold Budd-ish portentously meaningful piano notes and offers these as persuasive reasons not to dispose of this stubbornly right-here right-now album.

I don't doubt that Riton has the studio abilities to profitably assist a former Spice Girl in running up the charts. If Ronny Jordan wants to make a loungy trip-hop album, Riton's got what it takes to sucker at least a million punters. However, nothing on Beats du Jour proclaims any contribution to the future. For all we know, Riton could be passionate about polka, or Deicide, or bowling. Beats du Jour has no fever about it, and moreover, it succeeds only in showcasing today's blue-plate special, never even hinting at delights that might yet await us.

-Paul Cooper