Chicks On Speed - '99 Cents' (Chicks On Speed) Released 20/10/03

A year on from the supposed "Summer of Electroclash", there are several things worth noting. Firstly, Fischerspooner are not at all the biggest band in the world. Secondly, none of us think we're robots (although, via a sinister "create the perfect garage rock band" experiment, the Strokes may well be). And finally, Chicks On Speed are still ignoring the whole thing, and continue to make some of the most exciting electronic pop music of the last decade.

As their second album proper, '99 Cents' is where the bizarre Berlin trio finally stop twatting about and hone their self-released disco-playground chants into a fine art. Last single 'We Don't Play Guitars' is a classic example, starting off like Kathleen Hanna's Le Tigre on steroids before building into an almost-certainly improvised breakdown section. Naturally, this explodes into a wailing guitar solo from a moonlighting Peaches - exactly the sort of irony you might expect from a band initially formed as an art project. "Y'know, maybe C-O-S don't play guitars, but P-E-A-C-H-E-S plays guitar…" is their cheerful disclaimer, and will probably have you pissing yourself at the sheer exhilarating greatness of it all. The whole thing sounds like Bow Wow Wow and Adult fighting over a drum machine, and is consequently fucking ace.

Chock-full of guest appearances (Tina Weymouth even crops up to help shout along with a top-notch cover of her own 'Wordy Rappinghood') and rammed with great tunes, the only (very slight) problem with '99 Cents' is that each song is near-identical to the one before it. That said, the excitement never lets up, and even if the whole Electroclash movement died on its arse before the starting pistol was even fired, this ably demonstrates that there's plenty of life left in the genre. Ladytron may be taking the title as the overlords of sequencer-based pop, but Chicks On Speed are putting forward a convincing challenge. Totally wired.