Imagine a musical canvas laying somewhere between the realms of Tackhead and Cameo: slap bass, funky guitar distortions, DTX drums. Now paint this canvas liberally with vocals which lay somewhere between Mark E. Smith, Jaz Coleman and an old cockney grocer (“Four for a pound! — luvverly juicy melons!!” etc). Shouldn’t work, should it? Well, that’s (kind of) the world in which this album lives. And, strangely enough, it does work.

Produced by Tackhead’s Keith LeBlanc, this debut album is a really hard one to pin down musically — and is all the more enjoyable because of it. The first track is a cover of Cameo’s basstastic ‘Talkin Out The Side Of Your Neck’, and it bounces along with the same pared-down funk as the original, but over the top of this (‘over the top’, indeed) is Coal Latter’s remarkable kind of “Southern Angry White-Guy With A Speech Impediment” rap.

The music is spot on — clean, crisp, and technically proficient. The vocals, meanwhile, are out-of-tune, mumbled, and smothered in biscuit-tin reverb — but they are so full of energy, vitriol and presumption that, goddammit, they bloody work!

The band’s own compositions continue in a similar vein with ‘Take Me For A Ride’, Coal screaming (again) “When you took me for a ride you didn’t take me far enough” — and, boy, is somebody going to pay. It’s not the technical proficiency of the musicians which makes this album work (and the musician’s are all extremely proficient), nor is it the proficiency of LeBlanc (ditto there), it’s Coal’s pure and simple bloody-mindedness. He knows he can’t sing, but he’s gonna squeeze every last yelp from his throat, and he’s gonna squeeze it at full force. Not once does he give less than 100%, and you can feel that, and that’s why it works.

There are a few instrumentals dotted around the album which try a little too hard to emulate Tackhead, and although they fall short, the likes of ‘Bass Hell’ and the closing track ‘Deconstruction’ are still very enjoyable.

But the centre-pieces of the album are the Coal Latter tour de force’s ‘Big Boss Boys’, ‘Why Dya Lie’ and the insanely catchy ‘Imagination’ — the latter of which is a rallying war cry against the inanity of corporate muso’s (“Gonna crash the bandwagon into the banks of the city where it belongs, along with your stupid songs…” — Genius!).

I’m not sure what happened to Hotalacio after this album, but even if they did nothing else, this alone is a modern-day electronic funk (with hardcore vocals) masterpiece. And I certainly haven’t heard anything quite like it before — but, hey, as the man says: “Not everyone wants to be plain, some people got imaginay-shu-hunn!”.