Available on: !K7 LP

Bada Bing, the fictional Strip Club lair of Tony Soprano et al is where this record was born, at least in my mind. The flashing purple neon, the dark seedy shadows, the grubby glare of women to the left, and to the right. Inside the sodium beam, Detroit polymath Jimmy Edgar sat in the corner, supping whisky from a filthy glass right next to Big T who smokes a Cuban. “Tony, I’ve got an idea for a record…”

Jimmy Edgar was uncovered by Warp in 2004, having previously cut his chrome-edged teeth as a not so tender fifteen year old on the Motor City rave scene. His full debut Color Strip was a sweaty, robo-techno thrill in analogue. Fast forward five years and Edgar has finally written a follow up: the !K7 landing, lap-dance inspired XXX.

Perhaps most well known for his fragile love song ‘I Wanna Be Your STD’ Edgar is clearly a man who isn’t afraid to embarrass his mother. Track titles here include the charming ‘Hot, Raw, Sex’, ‘Vibration’ and ‘Sleep Connexion (Date Rp)’. But regardless of sexual semantics Edgar certainly feels his way around music gear with some skill. XXX is deliciously marked by compressed kick drums, played taut against lightning quick synth stabs, pitch-bent lead lines and modulated bass funk tickles. All with a Princean deviance; a lecherous vocoder mingling in the dance with a click and throb that soon dissolves into deep, gossamer slow jams as good as anything Dam-Funk is rocking at the minute.

Vintage Detroit also gets called upon as linear Drexciyan electro is razed from Edgar’s underwater cyber-Atlantis, headed straight for the striptease. Indeed it is the work of Drexciya corporal, Gerald Donald and his Dopplereffekt masterpiece Gesamtkunstwerk that Edgar really needs to look toward for a high-concept, timeless work in electro-fetish style. Because sadly for all its contagious, sleazy merits XXX is more than likely to be just a mere footnote in Motor City sonic-time. And for the Edgar faithful they can but hope he builds on this, for he is obviously a very talented, if sex-addled musician.

Alex Wilson