Sheath

It's a tought time time for dance music believers. Mainstream house culture has imploded, with superclubs closing, dance magazines folding, and average sales for 12in-singles on a steady downward arc. Enter LFO. On their third album and first release for seven years, they open with the deliberately lo-fi 'Blown' and instantly transport you back. All muddy heart-tremor bass, creaky hissing beats and tinkling, tingling rivulets of synth, it has the enchanted, misty-eyed quality of childhood mornings when you wake to look through frost-embroidered bedroom windows. As bracing as snorting a line of Ajax, 'Mum-Man' is industrial-strength hardcore of the kind that mashed-up the more mental ravefloors in 1992.