At its worst, drum'n'bass can dissolve into mood music of the worst kind -- an undifferentiated fabric of received beats and prefabricated synth textures designed more to produce a Pavlovian effect in the listener ("Hey, there's that hip sound that I'm supposed to like") than to provide any real musical pleasure. But at its best, drum'n'bass can be a playground of advanced rhythmic and harmonic ideas, one that appeals equally to the hips and the head. With NYC D&B, the quartet known as Droid has managed to create some of the best drum'n'bass in several years, and (if the liner notes are to be believed) did so in a live, completely improvised manner to boot. The ten tracks on this album were recorded over a period of one year during Droid's residency at the Izzy Bar in New York; since the band includes a trumpet player, keyboardist, bassist, and drummer, the sound is quite a bit more organic than you'd expect for this genre, and it also gets quite jazzy at times without ever lapsing into acid jazz tedium. "Poly Bell" works a spare funk bassline under stabs of muted trumpet and jungly drums, creating a final product that sounds like an update on Massacre's classic sound; "Chronic Dub Mania" is a hyperkinetic jungle workout in which the frenetic drums and restrained bassline provide a base for alien synthesizer tones; and "Droid City" verges on rhythmic chaos but manages to keep the groove just barely in check, much the way surface tension keeps water from spilling over the edge of a glass even as it trembles in an arc just above the surface. This is a tremendously exhilarating album, one that fulfills the promise of a musical genre that all too frequently disappoints. ~ Rick Anderson