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*** Steve Lawler

NUBREED

(Global Underground)

British club DJ Steve Lawler’s two-disc debut CD complements the style of DJ Danny Tenaglia from opening to coda. His singers distort in the lower register, his rhythms boom through the bottom, echo effects and cries of “house music! house music!” abound — pretty much the way they do in one of Tenaglia’s wormholes of fantasy. Lawler’s use of Tenaglia’s style is by no means a bad thing: Tenaglia’s combination of deep big beats and weirdly spaced-out vocals has taken house music to planets of inner ecstasy. Still, Lawler doesn’t fly quite so high; there’s just a touch of alternative rock in his cranky rhythms, and they lack the sweet silky slow of a Tenaglia set. His vocals, too, have a snarly edge to them quite different from the gossamer girlishness Tenaglia’s singers exude. Nonetheless, his loopiest selections — Matthias Heilbronn’s “Arriba Abajo,” DJ Pippi’s “Feel It,” Green Velvet’s “Answering Machine,” Peace Division’s “Feel My Drums,” and Satoshi Tomie featuring Kelly Ali’s “Up in Flames” — bump and bubble, as darkly drunken as any of Tenaglia’s irrational arsenics. If this set is what Lawler has in him, midnight fame is assured.

— Michael Freedberg