Aah, how mysterious – a demo with no song titles, perhaps in order to make us resort to that staple of the ignorant reviewer, ‘Track 1′, ‘Track 2′ and so forth. No such luck, we’re just going to have to invent some song titles using a random title generator we found on this great glorious internet of ours. Who knows, some of them might even stick.

Anyway, this is the new effort from Grudle Bay Riots, the chaps who brought you the rather excellent That-Fucking-Tank-meets-Level-42 instrumental combo P.Y.E., and it couldn’t be any more different from that band’s funk-tinged angularity, instead taking its cue from the maligned ‘folktronica’ label to produce some rather cracking laid-back beats.First track ‘Cyclops Jackass’, although apparently heavily endebted to Four Tet, is a bona fide winner. A central acoustic guitar loop gels the whole thing together, while splattering samples, swooning synth pads and some neatly jazz-tinged breaks do their thing on the periphery. It manages to come across as laid back (mellow even, and I hate adjectives like ‘mellow’ as much as anyone. Why not just call it magnolia and be done with it?) without becoming tiresome at any point – no mean feat.There are some great ideas in here for sure, and although we spent some of the 18 minutes on offer waiting for a seriously big 4/4 kick to drop, that’s probably just our frustrated inner techno kid talking.

The organ-driven ‘Grimacing Zero Hack’ doesn’t come off so well, since we don’t really notice it playing after listening to it three times over. It’s a little inconsequential, although the stop-start breaks work well at reattracting the attention, and the track would serve very well with MF Doom laying down some rhymes over the top. But he isn’t, so we’ll move onto ‘Jittery Drink’, which sounds a little like Luke Vibert if he’d grown up mucking about playing on the lids of paint cans in his dad’s garage with his mate on a knackered acoustic. That’s not to do GBR’s lo-fi aesthetic any disservice, as there are some great ideas in here, and the whole thing is certainly a dish best served live, where you can see the intricacy and musicianship that’s clearly gone into playing this stuff out rather than just looping it from a laptop and doing that bobbing-head thing so beloved of the IDM set. Closing track ‘Upstream Common Fire’ is also a cracker, sounding for all the world like incidental music to Wizards & Warriors as played on a short-circuiting old-skool console, but terrific for it. Check ’em out live – it’s a treat.