In 1999, French producer Quentin Dupieux, aka Mr. Oizo, propelled his song "Flat Beat" to the top of the UK charts by placing it in a trendily absurd Levi's commercial. The ad, which Dupieux directed, featured a puppet named Flat Eric bobbing his little yellow head to a skidding, shuddering bassline. That's him on this album's cover, about to get eye-sliced Un Chien Andalou- style. This seems to impy that Mr. Oizo is putting Flat Eric-- and perhaps the catchy, irritating style of "Flat Beat"-- out to pasture for good. But this turns out not to be the case. If you can remember (or YouTube) that commercial, then you already have a good idea of what to expect from Lamb's Anger: cockamamie bass patterns that zoom and stutter, ear-grating trebles punching in, and a sense of going nowhere fast on Daft Punk's fumes. The album seems intent on emphasizing its own annoying qualities; you start to wonder if Oizo is secretly a minimalist trying to destroy French touch from the inside.

Overblown and frantic, with a surplus of sounds and a dearth of ideas, Lamb's Anger too often falls back on cliché, and a shrieking, nerve-shredding resgister. There are hideous vocoder mumbles on "Hun", arpeggios based on an idea of funk derived from the "Seinfeld" theme on "Z" and "W", schmaltzy guitar and horn licks on "Cut Dick", cynically hedonistic club raps on "Steroids" and "Two Takes It" (the former a snap-music-inspired Uffie vehicle, the latter an electro flip of Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock's "It Takes Two" featuring Carmen Castro, who's either a spot-on Uffie imitator or just Uffie under a pseudonym). There are antagonistically ugly synth tones bleating all over the place, and squealing soul-diva cuts on the astonishingly cluttered "Gay Dentist", which sounds like a C + C Music Factory song imported to iTunes from a badly scratched CD. It isn't the only track that verges on open hostility; See how long you can withstand "Blind Concerto", with which Oizo closes the album, as if maliciously farting on his way out of the room.

The most lucid and listenable tracks are the smoother ones-- the aforementioned "Cut Dick", and the breezy lite-funk of "Jo", a blatant approximation of the Field. A handful of experimental pieces, like the ominous rave-siren workout "Bruce Willis Is Dead", fare better than the club songs, simply because they're supposed to be incoherent. But they suffer from the same structural deficiency; namely, a profound lack of communication between adjacent loops, which are so isolated that they might as well have picket fences between them. Most tracks consist of rigid repetitions of a single basic theme, afflicted with every rhythmic convulsion and soft-synth tone imaginable. There's a glut of movement within each bar, but little sense of movement across the bars, no overarching pulse or momentum. This constant feeling of starting over at every one-beat is exhausting, and makes the music seem at once predictable and erratic. Groups like Justice do tooth-grindingly obnoxious machine-noise anthems right, a thrilling hair's breadth away from too-muchness. But handled this clumsily, this ungenerously? There's not enough cocaine in the whole wide world.