The title of Paranoid London’s new album, Arseholes, Liars, and Electronic Pioneers, reflects the current state of the world, and the corrupt and inept that our apathy has allowed to take charge. For the duo the only sanctuary / escape is music. 

The opener People Ah Yeah, starring Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie, is blissed-out beatless electronica. A lullaby like Silver Apples, or Suicide, surfing the waves of the paranoid pairs’ ubiquitous TB-303. Bobby’s prayer-like plea calls back to the E-d up unity of the second summer of love. However, I get the feeling that the track’s a little tongue-in-check, a bit of misdirection, since the rest of the record punches and kicks like one bad acid house mother fucker.

Nearly every tune features a guest vocalist, folks that include a few familiar, and a few fresh faces. Regular collaborators, Josh Caffe and Mutado Pintado, both return. Caffe continues to channel Jamie Principle on Start To Fade – a sleazy serenade that’s concerned with public masks and the private shedding of these disguises. Mr. Pintado does his distinctive dark disco beat poet thing on The Motion. Reciting what seems to be an extract from his hugely hedonistic autobiography over driving drums and siren-like synths. On Suck A Dick he doffs his chapeau to the mighty Maurice Joshua while singing the praises, the joys, of a well proportioned penis. 

Jennifer Touch too brings a taste of her gothic flavour to a couple of tracks. She echoes, like an ethereal spectre, in and out of Fields Of Fire’s bruising electro-funk. Something that builds from a grimy groove of busted, dusted, breakbeats into a trance-inducing trip, as ringing sequences and collaged snares are sent spinning in, while Jennifer witchy whispers “We are not alone.” More of a “proper” song, the wonderful Touch The State Of That moves between defiant mantra and wounded new romantic epic. 

Fat Dog’s Joe Love fronts Love Ones Self, a beatific ballad about beating off set to stripped back old school Chicago jack. Where climaxing results in wild William Blake-ian visions. DJ Genesis also achieves erotic epiphany on Up Is Down, as she recounts dangerous, strobe-lit, dancefloor liaisons.

Paranoid London’s Arseholes, Liars, and Electronic Pioneers can be ordered directly from the band themselves.