I like to think my taste in dance music is fairly ecumenical, but in truth no specific scene or sub-genre can come close to dislodging the special place in my heart reserved for the UK Garage (or 2-step garage) sound. The jittery fusion of house, R&B, dancehall, and drum & bass that ruled UK dancefloors at the turn of the millennium at times struck me as the very ideal of dance music: simultaneously pop and underground, restlessly mutational yet instantly identifiable, veering from intense physical roughness to charming singalong sweetness as if these two poles were ultimately indistinguishable.

When 2-step garage morphed into the darker, less hedonistic sounds of grime and dubstep about five years ago, it was a bit perplexing to learn that erstwhile fans still pining for good times party music had returned to the welcome embrace of house music proper. I mean, I love my house, but stepping off the rollercoaster ride of 2-step's golden age, it was difficult not to wonder, "Is that all there is...?"

It's both reassuring and exciting, then, to discover that the children of UK Garage have effectively come good, with two variations on the post-garage sound recently emerging as indefatiguable engines of excitement and innovation. In the North of the UK, there's the bassline sound, built around stiff beats, turgid basslines, high-pitched female vocals and rudeboy MC chants. In London, the favoured sound is "funky house," a confusing moniker that makes it hard to distinguish from the amorphous mush of overlapping house strains (tribal, filter disco, US garage, latin, electro-house) that has dominated commercial clubs for more than a decade. More specifically, "funky house" in this context takes its cues from the Afrobeat-influenced sound of New York's Ibadan label, all multi-tiered tribal percussion, sweet female garage vocals, all leavened with the percussive lurch of Carribean soca music.

At first glance the Northern bassline scene would seem to have the edge on funky house: rougher and faster, its warped electronic textures give it a sickly, drug-affected sound that seems more in tune with the ethos of rave and less beholden to the classiness of American house. And bassline beat funky house to the charts with last year's brilliant anthem "Heartbroken" by producer T2. But increasingly it feels like funky house is the scene to watch, its initially familiar indebtedness to US house concealing a secret thirst for mutation and experimentation.

In fact, the key to funky house's appeal is how it casts further afield from the traditional preoccupations of garage or grime; bassline house makes sense as a descendant of speed garage and grime, but funky house's combination reference points (tribal house, soca, the decidedly bourgeois "broken beat" scene) can seem rather staid on paper. In this risk lies the music's reward: increasingly abandoning the basic 4X4 house template, funky house producers have been able to concoct a sound entirely distinct from its forebears, neither monolithically pummeling, nor nervous and fidgety, but somehow both and neither of these at the same time, all combined with a loose-limbed, well, funkiness that's entirely its own. What this "funkiness" is precisely is hard to say, as the music hasn't settled on a single rhythmic matrix yet, and still pursues various strategies to create its oddly unified vibe: kick-kick-snare soca beats, perversely syncopated rhythms stolen from broken beat, multi-tiered Latin percussion, and even blocky loops that resemble grime at its most organic.

If you're keen for an official and physically manufactured intro, the default choice is Supa D's new mix-CD Rinse 03, which is part of a series of compilations released by Rinse FM's regular DJs and the first to focus exclusively on funky house. It's a fair enough overview, with a decent sprinkling of many of the scene's best tracks to date, including DJ NG's slick vocal anthem "Tell Me" and Geeneus's brilliant partytime fix-up of Benga & Coki's pasty dubstep crossover tune "Night." But on the whole Rinse 03 is tilted towards the more polite end of funky house, and at times resembles a tepid, cautious tribute to the US sound that forms the scene's original jumping-off point. "Look at us," this UK-producer-only compilation seems to be saying, "we can do a great imitation of US producers." Which is pleasant enough as it goes, but only occasionally does Supa D's mix remember that the UK scene is mostly more interesting at the points where it diverges sharply from its US lineage.

For a decidedly more exciting take on this music, one has to turn to other radio DJs, such as Rinse FM's Crazi Cousinz or Deja FM's Marcus Nasty. Nasty's shows in particular are astonishing, matching a seamless web of the scene's most inventive productions to the constant chatter of MCs. If bassline house's rigid beats and turgid basslines inevitably lead to a similarly blocky, angry chant MC style, the loose uptempo vibe of funky coaxes a more gracious and urbane flow, serenely floating on top of the tracks with a fleet-footed percussive dexterity, adding another level of rhythmic complexity to the already multi-tiered grooves.

Crazi Cousinz's shows are more haphazard, but the group have the advantage of being the scene's hottest producers, and they fill their shows with a treasure trove of their own tracks. No one better exemplifies the sheer range of this music, spanning the spectrum from rough to refined. The raucous instrumental "Top Up" is a gimmick track, its bouncy groove pivoting around a computerized voice encouraging listeners to top up their phone credit. Conversely, the group's remix of Kyla's "Do You Mind" is an effete but lethal vocal track, its rippling soca percussion rubbing up against jazzy piano cadences and infantile R&B vocals to create a delicious tension.

Somewhere in between is "Bongo Jam", a goofy anthem whose vague allusions to Afrobeat are made comically explicit by its irresistible singalong chant, "Sometimes I wake up early in the morning to play my con-con-congo." If there's a better dance track this year I've yet to hear it.

Releases from producers such as Apple or Footloose reach towards a fusion of instrumental grime and tribal house drums, all juddering syncopated beats and crude horn fanfares. Imagine Swizz Beatz circa 1999 crafting homages to Masters At Work and you're about there, with all the loveable ungainliness such a scenario implies. The mind-boggling tribal thuds of Apple's "Mr Bean" and "Bean Get Well Soon" are so twisted and syncopated they make most 2-step and grime appear tame. How, then, can this music be considered "funky house"?

But this contradictory quality is crucial: often what thrills most is how moments of unsettling strangeness suddenly burst through a hitherto comfortable, familiar stylistic template, like when the warm soca-house groove of Geeneus' "Yellow Tail" is interrupted by shouts of "Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!" and blasts of discordant synth chords. These sudden glimpses of the future may well end up being more exciting than the final destination. Like speed garage giving birth to 2-step garage in late 1997, or garage giving way to grime in 2002, right now "funky house" is a music of possibility and potentiality.

In an odd way, it's the relative conservatism of the music's starting premises that allow this to happen. House always seems so timeless and perfected that it's easy to assume it's also creatively exhausted; and admittedly the specific appeals of this brand of "funky house" are clustered around the style's gross distortions of its original house template. But, as with speed garage in 1997 or so, it's precisely that obvious, unthreatening universality that is key here: the phrase "funky house" acts a reset button, opening up a musical space that is shorn of the biases, pretensions and presumptions that inevitably grow up around any established genre and narrow its field of possibility. Few people expect anything in particular of funky house, beyond vague notions of good times and female-friendly singalong tunes; it's even lost the veneer of glamour it might have once had. Freed from the weight of expectation, producers can get away with a great deal more.

Later on, we'll be able to look back and discern a narrative, to signpost almost precisely the moments when the goalposts were shifted and the paradigm transformed. But right now all such narrative flourishes are up for grabs, and the resulting sense of uncertainty is as satisfying as it is disarming for a critic like me. Critics like to look into the rearview mirror and think they see the future; what distinguishes UK funky house from any other style currently going is not merely that this story hasn't been written, but that it's moving so fast and so multi-directionally that such attempts at prophecy seem feeble even before they hit the page. To be able to accurately predict the future is fun, but to be in the thick of it, to hear the future emerging so unexpectedly that it confounds your predictions... there's quite seriously nothing better.

UK Funky House Top Ten:
Crazi Cousinz - Bongo Jam
Apple - Mr Bean
Seany B - Stomper
Kyla - Do You Mind (Crazi Cousinz Remix)
Sticky - How Very Dare You
Geeneus - Yellow Tail
Footloose - Hurry Up
DJ NG ft. MC Versatile & Baby Katy - Tell Me
DJ Naughty - Quicktime
Benga & Coki - Night (Geeneus Remix)

Glass Candy's Beat Box album emerged at the tail end of last year, and in the typical December rush, I slightly underestimated (or perhaps simply took for granted) its arch charms, despite being hooked on the chilly Italo-disco revivalism of the duo's label Italians Do It Better for much of last year. I've returned to it often lately, though, especially to this album's version of the duo's cover of Kraftwerk's "Computer Love", which shifts from spare and dreamy to an impossibly lush outro that rivals anything I've heard in the past 12 months for sheer beauty.

Listening to Glass Candy's records, I had assumed that singer Ida No's glassy, distracted distance stemmed from a kind of icy reserve, whether real or staged; I expected her live shows to be full of energetic but blank performances somewhere between Roisin Murphy and Debbie Harry. Instead, when I saw the duo perform last week, she embodied an unembarrassed hippie euphoria, skipping around the stage in a fruit-loop smock and tights, and waving her arms in vaguely deliberate tree-branch formations, like Kate Bush's "Wuthering Heights" transformed into an exercise video. Imploring the audience to leave behind their humanity and become colors and shapes, she resembled a drama teacher taking bewildered students through a "physical expression" class, blissfully ignorant of their unease. If she still seemed distant, it was less about her refusing to come to us than us being unable to go completely to her.

Equally as compelling was bandmate Johnny Jewel, triggering backing tracks and playing live synth arpeggios on top, all the while jumping up and down like he wanted to bust out a keytar. But if he looked like he was just bashing the keys, the complexity of his wall-of-sound suggested otherwise: synth melodies interlocked and spiralled over each other with a woozy abandon that helped conceal the military precision with which each motif was deployed. The show's pinnacle was the duo's cover of La Belle Epoque's "Miss Broadway", with No's shrill sighs ultimately subsiding into awed silence before Jewel's ever-expanding concoction of pirouetting synthesisers, disco strings, and faux-saxophones.

It is, of course, a very indie reflex to want to dress up old populist sounds with more serious "musical" pretensions, and the most obvious distinction between Jewel's work and proper, honest-to-goodness Italo-disco from the eighties is the former's portentous air of foreboding, even on tunes as relatively fun and frivolous as "Miss Broadway," to say nothing of the moody tributes to The Cure that make up the bulk of his recent work with labelmates Chromatics. But it's precisely because of the unabashed cheesiness of italo-disco that it makes such a fitting backdrop to the post-punk and new wave allusions of Jewel's collaborators. Of course Italo-disco doesn't need Italians Do It Better's artists to retrospectively guarantee its worth; after eight years or so of italo revivalism in dance music, such a claim would be as naively ignorant as it is misguided. Really, it's the other way 'round: An act like Glass Candy needs Italo-disco to ground its skewed charm, like a succubus surviving only on the blood of its victims. Parasitic, sure, but indie music (not least of all indie dance music) has always been this way, and it's too late in the day for hand-wringing.

I'm torn on the question of whether Jewel and friends should go more or less disco; the joyous "Miss Broadway" was a revelation in a live setting, but Jewel's panoramic Italo grooves often sound best at their most wraith-like, as on last year's productions for Farah on the label's After Dark compilation. As I understand it, Farah is a young Persian beat poet from Texas, a dubious tag to say the least, but it works brilliantly. On "Law of Life" she recites a state-of-the-world soliloquy in a voice that moves through paranoia, insight, resignation, and hallucination with the barest shift in intonation, while behind her Jewel's impossibly statuesque synth arpeggios quietly announce the end of the world. On "Dancing Girls" she slips in and out of Persian, and sleepily murmurs tantalizing phrases like "Oriental dress/ The one you love is a mess...dancing from the opium."

With its slowly shuffling tabla beats, spaceship synthesiser noises, and glinting guitar picking, Farah's new track "Baby Girl" reveals just how far the label's aesthetic can stretch, secured only by the solitary thread of throbbing keyboards. The song shares the same druggy, drone-y vibe as IDIB's other material, but the decoupling of that vibe from the label's trademark Italo grooves suggests a broad terrain of avant electronic pop for the label's artists to explore should they choose.

If Italians Do It Better can successfully make that jump so early on its development, it'll be something of a coup; my personal daydream is of a modern day version of Factory Records, perhaps with Jewel as the equivalent of New Order's Be Music production house. The danger of this route is the possibility that the artists won't be able to find an adequate replacement for the easy charms of the Italo template; it's Farah's at times facile lyrics and dress-rehearsal performance, rather than the music, that makes "Baby Girl" a comparatively weak effort from her, but it's the move away from hypnotic post-Moroder grooves that brings the song's shortcomings into sharp focus, whereas a non-stop disco beat can absolve all sorts of transgressions.

But new IDIB signing Invisible Conga People amply demonstrate that the pay-off can be worth the risk, fashioning a Krautrock-house hybrid that sounds utterly distinct while fitting the label's aesthetic hand-in-glove. On their debut twelve-inch, "Weird Pains" sets spaced-out minimal bleeping and ticking beats against incomprehensible whispers and mutters, before giving way to hypnotic tribal percussion that appears to have wandered in from a Luciano or Ricardo Villalobos record. The overall effect falls somewhere between Kompakt's Matias Aguayo and a synthetic Can, the duo's freeform live jamming circling around a muffled house thud. But Invisible Conga People also share Jewel's love of keyboard patterns that seem to float off into the ether, like a receding stretch of road illuminated by taillights. The A-side "Cable Dazed" ramps up the prettiness factor by cross-pollinating the murky glower of "Weird Pains" with the spacey new age arpeggios of Tangerine Dream and sweet but indecipherable duet vocals. Imagine the DFA remix of Delia & Gavin's "Rise" refashioned as a close-harmony pop song, and you're close.

Meanwhile, Invisible Conga People's remix of Simian Mobile Disco's "I Got This Down" is a startling, sideways swerve into (something approaching) dance-pop, overlaying floaty synth arpeggios, hesitant piano chords, and almost cheesy breakbeat house rhythms, contrasting SMD's nu-rave with an alternate lineage of gentle emo-rave running through Future Sound of London's "Papua New Guinea" and 69's "Desire." Here the group's "Krautrock" side exists as a kind of spectral presence, an air of seriousness and reverence, but you'd be forgiven for also thinking of Enigma. This almost-camp level of earnestness is no bad thing, in this case; as with the rest of the artists on Italians Do It Better, Invisible Conga People revel in the intoxicating power of the fetish, and the track's primitive dance signifiers fairly shine in the light of the duo's awed regard for them.

Glass Candy [MySpace]
Farah [MySpace]
Invisible Conga People [MySpace]
Italians Do It Better [MySpace]

As a sound and a scene both, the dance music sub-genre "balearic" is obsessed with marginalia. If this was true of the term's original incarnation—think of UK DJ Paul Oakenfold boasting of dancing in Ibiza, one of the islands from which the sound gets its name, in the late 80s to a soundtrack of Chris Rea and the Woodentops while high on ecstasy for the first time—it is doubly true of its reemergence today, when reissues and digital downloads place almost the entire history of modern music at the dilettante DJ's fingertips. (Or enough of that history so as to hardly make a difference.) Less "anything goes," perhaps, and more "everything goes."

Well, not everything. For one, in today's revivalist parlance balearic does conjure up at least some stylistic markers: slow, torpid grooves baring at the very least a tangential relationship to disco, and florid musical arrangements, especially anything with splashes of synthesiser color, sparkles of flamenco guitar, or the now-cheesy frippery of once-earnest world music signifiers. More subtly, balearic shies away from music that is self-consciously "bleeding edge", music that clearly blazed a trail and set the terms of a new zeitgeist.

Partly, it's because too much success and recognition goes against what at times can be an obscurantist vibe running through balearic music and those who play it. Where balearic enthusiasts would most readily acknowledge genius would be in cases of "forgotten heroes" such as Arthur Russell; now universally hailed as a visionary, Russell's obscurity throughout the '80s assures permanent martyr-like status as an uncomfortable outsider, perched precariously on the (hitherto unimaginable) borders between disco, pop and modern classical music.

Perhaps though it's the liminality of Russell's sound, and that others like him, more than their obscurity, which renders them appealing to this mindset. Current gold-digging sets from self-styled "balearic" DJs are filled with examples of ostentatious border-crossings: from hoary disco-rock extravaganzas (Zazu's "Captain Starlight"); to frail acoustic ballads from R&B groups (the "Folk Version" of Womack & Womack's "Missing Persons Bureau"); to starry-eyed Afro-pop from erstwhile spare folk-rock crooners (Paul Simon's "Diamonds on the Soles of her Shoes", recently transformed by Scandanavian producer Todd Terje into a dazzling dub-disco epic).

That last example isn't obscure at all, but obscurity and liminality converge in the ever-present danger of a song or act falling between the cracks. Whether due to crudity, tardiness, popular failure, or some other perceived illegitimacy, balearic-identified music stands apparently condemned—literally as "marginalia"—by the relentless hierarchical/chronological advance of history, its fate to be forgotten or at least politely ignored by tastemakers and hoi poloi both. At least, that's how it's supposed to work; the curious emergence of Simon's Graceland as a key reference point for indie-rock in 2008 is testament to the fact that history has an interesting sense of humor.

No current act reflects this aesthetic of looking to the margins better than Norwegian remix team Mungolian Jet Set. Starting life as a self-consciously wacky electronic jazz group, two years ago they added a low-slung 4X4 beat to their noodlings and declared loose allegiance to Lindstrom-style space disco. If they're clearly balearic, it's less to do with their actual sound than a certain sensibility: their perversity, their unabashed love of the epic, their willingness to court bad taste.

So while their remix of Lindstrom's "A Blast of Loser" may sound like Creedence Clearwater Revival at the Hacienda, their remix of LSB's "Original Highway Delight" is simply burbling italo-disco rewritten on a grand scale, complete with glass-shattering Minnie Ripperton vocals performed by the group itself. Conversely, their take on Ost & Kjex's "Milano Model" (the remix proudly boast the title of "A Thrilling Mungophony in Two Parts") is so gratuitously maximal and excessively camp that it could be Basement Jaxx writing a new soundtrack for The Rocky Horror Picture Show. That, or the Wicked Witch of the West's henchmen putting on a cabaret show for Dorothy and all her friends.

Meanwhile, recent remixes for Ronny and Renzo and Mari Boine see the group lost in a lush, alien soundworld somewhere between the ethnodelic mystery of Brian Eno and David Bryne's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, and the cheesy progtastic expansiveness of Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld. If previous productions were tinged with an air of comedy, on these more "serious" efforts it becomes (almost disconcertingly) clear that Mungolian Jet Set are personally committed to their ethic of excess. The remix of Boine's "It Ain't Necessarily Evil" is their finest work to date in its capacity to set any number of ill-fitting elements in suspended orbit around an all-consuming disco beat, from Mexican guitar licks to what sounds like Rolf Harris' wobble board, while still retaining an air of expansive mysteriousness rather than patent ridiculousness.

Mungolian Jet Set's live performance suggests they haven't completely nailed the transition to tight production team; if their recorded output is thrilling partly because of how closely it hovers above the line between chaos and order, when I saw them play in Paris last year I started to doubt whether such a line existed, or whether the band or the audience would recognise it if it did. Thunderous disco grooves would emerge triumphantly, only to be lost moments later under the confused melange of melodies and keyboard improvisations. At its most clangingly discordant, I was reminded uncomfortably of the kind of self-important collaborations one sees at gallery functions, where a laptop DJ is pitted against a group of traditional "third world" instrumentalists to the detriment of all involved.

Down the front, some kids tried to dance in a desultory, hippy fashion, the kind of dancing non-dancers often engage in, heavy on the flowing arm movements and appearing to bear no relationship to the groove actually playing. It seemed appropriate though: anyone trying to catch the beat soon would have been confounded. But if the performance didn't quite match my expectations, it still sketched out clearly the promise of this group and their unpredictable, ridiculous sound; what makes Mungolian Jet Set's recorded work so exciting is precisely how it seems to snatch victory from the jaws of disaster, venturing dangerously into a no man's land of overblown grandiosity, and coming back with treasures that in anyone else's hands would be mere trash.

Perhaps it's partly this sense of audacity—as well as, er, my trend-happy gullibility—which makes me disinclined to dismiss the return of balearic as just the latest in a long line of dubious revivals. Some critics have complained that each attempt to rehabilitate a sound previously cordoned off as beyond saving—from soft rock to hair metal—advances a "flattening out" of enjoyment, whereby we lose the capacity to distinguish between actually bad and good music. But maybe this very loss helps makes the enjoyment of, er, nu-balearic music so masochistically intense: it's because of one's instinctive resistance to this music's absurdity that the moment of capitulation becomes all the sweeter.

Mungolian Jet Set [MySpace]

As the clock ticked over from 2006 to 2007 it was a (then unknown to me) house remix of Beyonce's "Ring the Alarm" that ushered in the New Year, its commanding presence and martial tone mirroring the almost grim determination that seemed to fill the club by this point: dancers had popped their pills and narrowed their options of potential assignations down to shortlists, and the time for fun was over. Shit was getting serious.

It's part of the genius of the Freemasons' remix of "Ring The Alarm" that, despite being better than any other example of, er, well, let's call it gay house, that I heard last year, it is defiantly not fun. With its shrill string riffs and strident house pulse, the remix sounds purposeful and decisive where the original sounded (enjoyably) confused and frantic. Beyonce's vocal is slowed down to lock step with the pounding groove, infused with a studied, almost objective air, less railing against her lover than calmly pronouncing a law of historical materialism.

This transition expressed something eternal in the physical distinction between R&B and diva house: if the slowed down, throbbing grooves of R&B seem to insert themselves in the electrified space between two dancers, the histrionic diva house anthem is sexually charged only as an afterthought; its primary purpose is subjugating and ordering an entire floor of dancers. In the Freemasons' hands, "Ring The Alarm" becomes less intimate or interesting, because anything that stands in the way of this higher purpose is ruthlessly suppressed.

Right now it's a common experience to go to commercial house clubs and unwittingly hear a half-dozen Freemasons tracks and remixes in the space of an hour. This monopoly is a simple consequence of supply and demand in commercial house music: as nearly every other major producer has embraced the hyperactive synth arpeggios and lumpen guitar riffs of electro-house, the Freemasons are almost alone in having kept faith with the larger-than-life disco-house sound that defined the genre at the beginning of the decade. Or at least, they're the only ones to have done so while still sounding interesting.

In fact, it's less a fidelity to any particular sub-strand of house that defines the Freemasons — they're prone to indulging in synth arpeggios too, and are as fond of David Morales-style piano, William Orbit-style trance chords and Deep Dish-style wispy overproduction as they are Joey Negro-style disco strings — as they way their music unconcernedly transcends any particular historical moment in commercial house as if to embrace all of them.

Still, there's definitely something very '90s about the Freemasons, as much because I have no idea what they look like. In an era when even middle-aged veteran commercial house producers feel compelled to sport eyeliner and assymetrical haircuts in order to establish a profile, the ubiquitous, omnipresent invisibility of the Freemasons is a great comfort. Their reliable presence on track three of every other new female-fronted R&B single reminds me of such daring and forgotten predecessors as Peter Rauhoeffer, Club 69, Maurice Joshua, and Thunderpussy—all noble culture warriors for the cause of anonymous and functional house remixes.

How does the Freemasons' staunch defence of house anonymity square with intriguing reports that Beyonce is drafting them in to produce her next album? It's true to say that R&B and house are closer to one another than they've been since the mid-nineties: just witness the success of Rihanna's "Don't Stop The Music," driven by the economic crunch of a pounding four-by-four beat. You'd probably have to go back to the heyday of Whitney Houston's songs for The Bodyguard to find anything comparable. It's understandable that Beyonce's got one eye on her key rival and perhaps a second eye on her international market (always more sympathetic to house than U.S. listeners). But what would a Freemasons-produced R&B album sound like?

A small clue can be found in their "radio edit" of Kelly Rowland's "Work," which junks the tense Scott Storch funk of the original in favour of a soundclash between frenzied tablas and Spanish trumpet on the one hand, and a shiny, carefree disco groove on the other. The track strongly alludes to house, but nonetheless moves at an R&B tempo, one more suitable for bumping and grinding than hands in the air euphoria. What mostly carries over from the Freemasons' house work is their strange capacity to throw everything but the kitchen sink at a groove and still come up with something that sounds deliberately unthreatening. It's a nice trick: what defines the sudden resurrection of four-by-four disco grooves in R&B and pop (see Britney's "Gimmer More", Timbaland's "The Way I Are," etc.) is how comfortable and comforting these tunes are, emphasising durable craft rather than stunning sound design.

But the Freemasons' greatest strength as house remixers or even urban producers — their defiant anti-charisma — becomes a mixed blessing on their own releases. The overwhelming but generic assault of their sonic blueprint works best when rubbing up against personality-charged vocals from the likes of a Beyonce or a Faith Evans: their sassy, bumping disco remix of Faith's "Mesmerised" being perhaps their biggest track to date. Compare the startling, sensual force of those performances to the poised sweetness of the session singer on the duo's "Uninvited" (bizarrely, a cover of an old Alanis Morrissette hidden album track), where no matter how many histrionic string riffs the duo concoct in the background, the ultimately passive pleasantness of the vocal can't help but undercut the tune's wow factor.

On the duo's just released debut album (wryly titled Unmixed), one searches in vain for a storming diva-fest to quite match their takes on "Ring The Alarm" or "Déjà Vu," although the massive breakdowns and climaxes are all present and correct. Perhaps it's that, even when they draw on fabulous-sounding, big-chested house divas, like on the sweeping Salsoul-meets-Loleatta Holloway grandeur of "If", the producers seem unable to coax a performance that stands on its own, rather than sounding like just another functionally appropriate trick from their toolbox.

But once you adjust to this slight disappointment, the hyper-generic quality of these songs makes a great deal of sense: Unmixed recreates perfectly the essential interchangeability of the music at the seediest of commercial house clubs, where overt memorability takes a backseat to a certain sleek familiarity—in both the tunes and the erotic encounters they soundtrack. Every night, every moment, is meant to be indistinguishable from the previous, only bigger than before somehow. It's a vibe not really suited to solitary listening, but no music better sums up the... no, not the euphoria... the flushed, preening, wired-up largeness of the eternal now.