Coldcut 's CV makes for a slightly exhausting read. In the past decade, Jonathan Moore and Matt Black have been responsible for running an award-winning club night, launched three record labels, produced art installations for the Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art, the Pompidou in Paris and the Barbican in London, won a Sony award for their radio show, designed "real time sample manipulation" software called VJamm, founded a pirate TV station and an educational website about video manipulation, designed a computer game called Top Banana, attempted to launch their own political party, produced a play for Radio 3 and a film for the British Antarctic Survey. The level of polymath activity has been so intense as to obliterate the memory of the duo's late-1980s career as pop-dance producers, who sculpted Yazz and the Plastic Population's effervescent chart topper The Only Way Is Up, launched Lisa Stansfield's career with the fantastic People Hold On and, perhaps most remarkably, won a BPI award for Producer of the Year in 1990.
Today, the very notion of Coldcut winning a Brit seems deeply incongruous, like one of Autechre turning up as a contestant on Dancing on Ice. The duo appear to have spent the intervening years piloting their career as far away from the mainstream as possible. Certainly, any sense of intuitive pop nous seemed to have been rigorously excised from their last album, 1997's Let Us Play, which came laden with ideas that presumably sounded better in theory than coming out of the speakers, including a track about deforestation built around samples of sawing wood, and Noah's Toilet, on which a plummy-voiced girl complained about clubland cocaine use, accompanied by some very trying free jazz.
So it's something of a surprise when its belated follow-up opens with a naggingly catchy song called Man in a Garage and True Skool, a burst of party hip-hop lent a frantic edge by Roots Manuva. Coldcut have always delighted in flying in the face of dancefloor wisdom - closing their club night Stealth at the height of its popularity mouthing off in a genre characterised by clubbable good blokery - and with Sound Mirrors, they have made the kind of dance album that prevailed in the mid-1990s, but that hardly anyone seems either interested in or capable of making any more. It steers a course between sonic innovation and commercial appeal, in the spirit, if not the style, of Leftfield's Leftism or Underworld's Dubnobasswithmyheadman.
"We're not put off by competition - there isn't any competition," said Black in one of his more memorable 1990s outbursts. There's a distinct hint of the same cockiness in the way Sound Mirrors takes on an array of styles with enviable aplomb, from the 1980s-themed electroclash on Just For the Kick to Boogieman's approximation of dancefloor-infused hip-hop. Walk a Mile in My Shoes masters the tricky balance of euphoria and melancholy that characterised early vocal house tracks such as Joe Smooth's Promised Land or Sterling Void's It's Alright. The stunning A Whistle and a Prayer recalls the unsettling ambient pop found on Brian Eno's Another Green World.
But Sound Mirrors has more to offer than just eclectic showboating. A theme of creeping disquiet permeates the whole album, from Just For Kicks' dead-eyed vocal and camera shutter samples to the mounting sense of panic on the punningly titled Everything Is Under Control, featuring the inspired pairing of guitarist and vocalist Jon Spencer and unpredictable avant-rapper Mike Ladd.
Sound Mirrors only comes unstuck during Mr Nichols and Aid Dealer, when the dread spectre of the world's most dispiriting sub-genre, hip-hop poetry, rears its head. Unmetrical and expansive, hip-hop poetry is rap's own replacement bus service: it sort of does the same thing but takes infinitely longer and involves a lot of irritating and unnecessary fuss. Mr Nichols starts with an intriguing opening line - "Please Mr Nichols, come back inside the window" - but pretty soon you're on a slippery and familiar slope of cod-mysticism and rococo language: "For so long have you stood facing the setting sun, mistaking the complimentary unified duality of nature for good or evil," declaims guest vocalist Saul Williams, who's clearly never going to get a job with the Samaritans. "Face the rising sun!" he continues. "Note the energy sprawling from its centre, how it illumes us all!" There's something about the use of the word "illumes" that makes you want to go join Mr Nichols on his high-rise window-ledge.
It's a rare lapse on an otherwise assured, wildly varied, endlessly enjoyable album that finds Coldcut in a position even more unlikely than the podium at the Brits: dance producers at the top of their game, 19 years into their career.
* Download: A Whistle and a Prayer True Skool Everything Is Under Control
