Red Snapper are a British instrumental band founded in London in 1993 by Ali Friend. For their follow-up Making Bones they were joined by jungle MC Det. Making Bones A full decade of acid jazz never produced a more stunning fusion of electronic music with live instrumentation than Making Bones. Poised halfway between Sly & Robbie and Roni Size, Red Snapper's first album for a worldwide audience surfs a wave of breakbeat funk that includes nods to dub, punk, soul, drum'n'bass and hip-hop.

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• Red Snapper Making Bones
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Upon listening to Our Aim is to Satisfy Red Snapper, I went back to Making Bones, the group's last release, to make sure I hadn't underestimated it. Like everybody, I occasionally dismiss a record and find out later that I kind of like it. I remembered that I didn't think much about Making Bones when I reviewed it way back in 1998, and Our Aim is to Satisfy sounded good right out of the blocks. A quick listen to Making Bones eased my mind: it's not terrible, but it sounds pretty average. This year's model is anything but.

Red Snapper Making Bones

The songwriting is sharper, the sounds are more varied, and there is barely any British-accented rapping (an extreme and possibly xenophobic personal bias). Oddly, the thing that keeps this band from greatness is their insistence on a live rhythm section.

I never could have imagined myself saying such a thing five or six years ago. Back then, I always wanted drums to sound live, even if I knew they were sampled. I liked a certain amount of electro and '80s pop, but the sound of drum machines in general turned me off, especially when there was no 'song' working as a counter. But having ingested so much digitally-based music over the last couple of years, I've come to appreciate the expressive power of the computer. Red Snapper's drum sound and the stand-up acoustic bass are very similar on most of their tracks (also the problem with my once-beloved Soul Coughing), and it now strikes me as a limitation. Still, there's much on Our Aim is to Satisfy to love. The first track, 'Keeping Pigs Together,' sets the tone.

An instrumental (my favorite kind of Red Snapper track), the song borrows its chords from U2's lovely 'October,' adding a churning beat beneath to drive home the plaintive melody. Soon, the disc rolls into 'Some Kind of Kink,' wherein Red Snapper bring the funk with two basslines at work: one owes a lot to the O'Jays' 'For the Love of Money'; the other works its scholarship for the Roni Size Brown Paper Bag School of Slippery Acoustic Drum-n-Bass. Tack on a pounding snare, a spooky synth refrain, and some pinched, stanky vocals right out the 1970s and you got yourself a killer track. Similarly impressive is 'The Rake,' with an odd Donald Duck style vocorder and the kind of spare, low-key rapping I can deal with. And several of the new trip-hop-meets-soul cuts, which were unbearable on Making Bones, end up working rather well. 'Shellback' contrasts slow, heavy beats with the angelic voice of Karime Kendra. Sure, she hasn't got anything to say, but she says it rather beautifully.

A few of the tracks in the latter half of the record fail to register at all, but enough standouts remain to recommend Our Aim is to Satisfy to the curious.

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When a band decides to transfer the backbeats and looped riffs of drum 'n' bass or hip-hop to live instrumentation, it faces a crucial problem. No matter how precisely the live drummer lays down the backbeat, regardless of the bassist's tone, the band will be judged in relation to other live bands; the group will not be able to rely solely on the novelty of realtime performance if it wants to survive criticism. The compositions should reflect the advantages of human interaction. With Making Bones, Red Snapper present a brilliant downtempo / drum 'n' bass album. The core trio of Richard Thair (drums), Ali Friend (bass), and David Ayers on guitar specialize in a form of layering based on tiers of riffs. On a track such as 'Bogeyman', a backbeat and a handful of bass notes establish mood, tempo, and texture; a guitar riff (think the looping Eb lines on Miles Davis' On the Corner ) adds some sharpness or liquidity; and the layering proceeds from there, adding any variation of vocalist, trumpet, trombone, and cello/violin/viola. Several tracks reach a dynamic intensity through juxtaposing these layers of instrumental parts.

The only problem with this approach is its mundanity. Similar results could be, and are, achieved in-studio, using samples and synthesizers. I wonder if the 'fuck-off jazz' moniker the band has adopted refers to a dismissal of flexible improvisation. Since Charles Lloyd, Cannonball, and Miles Davis began seriously combining funk and rock rhythms with advanced jazz, the best fusion has pushed the groove outward with bold arrangements and improvisations, allowing individual players to transcend the basic beats. Red Snapper rarely does this, and even the trumpeter changes his tone only slightly to give some tracks more dynamism. Before their next album, Red Snapper should consider ways to make great fusion, not just great electronica played on live instruments.