2001 must've been the year of the strangely good gimmick album. We've had The Strokes, we've had The White Stripes, and falling into the same category, though obviously beamed in from a different planet, is one Felix Da Housecat with his Kittenz And Thee Glitz. Silly name, yes, and not quite what I was expecting when it turned up in the mail. Better, in fact.

I'm guessing that Felix hails from somewhere in the States, and certainly a lot of the grooves seem to fit somewhere within what I imagine must be the Detroit style, anyway, refreshingly funky in that bouncing bass way without sounding like a Groovebox pattern. Well and good. It's what's going on over the top that makes this really interesting, the Eurotrash* aesthetic behind the ironically banal lyrics about the Californian lifestyle, 'the glitz, the glamour', delivered by the various personalities of the people of whom Felix is trying to merge his brain with, as he puts it. "Silver Screen (Shower Scene)", which I did hear a couple of times on Triple J for the week I actually had it tuned in last year, isn't a bad indication of the album. And even though the feel is either slinky smooth or elegantly pissed, as in "Control Freaq", it certainly doesn't lay on the production values magnum cum laude like, well, pop music, instead getting the point through by observing the auld KISS principle, without getting all spartan about it.

And perhaps a little like Armand Van Helden's excellent Killing Puritans from a couple of years back, the added element of a "theme" really lifts the whole thing, even though Felix's agenda, if you could call it that, is slightly less serious than Armand's, and yet doesn't treat you like an complete idiot. Yeah, I can see why all the dance mags are yammering on about this one.

(*NB: When I mean Eurotrash, I don't mean the really evil gabber techno that comes out of the Low Countries. Hell no.)