**

INFINITE BEAT, VOL. 1

(City of Angels/Geffen)

Infinite Beat, Vol. 1 is Geffen's heavily marketed foray into the world of "cutting-edge" electronica compilations, and the effort is clearly novice. The disc brings together tracks meant for club consumption, packaged as music for a private-listening home-stereo audience. And the tracks here just don't hold up in that context. The assembled artists do succeed at maintaining a consistently dark tone across the breakbeat subgenres they cover. The mood is a foreboding stew of chronic-induced paranoia, which infects everything from the ostentatious virtuosity of drum 'n' bass parodist Squarepusher, to the big-beat stoopidity of Chemical Brothers-knockoffs the Hardknox; from the techstep jungle malaise of the Nico/Fierce team, to the Atari Teenage Riot-style digital-hardcore of Shizuo. Unfortunately, the beats are almost uniformly funkless and unoriginal, relying on industrial noise and sirens for emotional ambiance. Without compelling rhythms to anchor it, the anxiety Infinite Beat tries to convey comes across as merely so much posturing.

-- Marcus Wohlsen