Various | Teen Dance Music from China and Malaysia |Thrift Score | Various Countries

The comp also has a good back story. While thrifting for records, avid lounge/exotica collector (and curator of the e-museum www.showandtellmusic.com) "W.L." came across several paper bags of LPs. "It was hard for me not to get my hopes up flipping through them," he says in the liner notes. "The jackets seemed to indicate I was really scoring." Indeed. The listener gets to share in that sense of discovery--this is found art with no context provided, just a few photos of album covers.

For those familiar with the genre, Teen Dance Music includes tracks by the Stylers, Brothers Hawk, Man Chau Po Orchestra and the Silverstones, who some might know as the backup band for singer Penny Lim. The CD is more focused stylistically than Asian Takeaways, but it still shows off the wide variety of influences that these instrumental bands were soaking up.

To my mind, there's only one real shortcoming here: the compilation spends too much time on the familiar, featuring covers of Bond and Morricone themes and other Western instrumental mainstays.

No doubt, the goofy covers pay off in laughs. They also allow the listener to engage in a little armchair comparative musicology. Though the musicianship and production are generally excellent, the nuances and musical accents are all a little strange. In this way, it's reminiscent of Paul West's Terrestrials, a novel about humans whose fictive author is a space alien. In both cases, what gets lost in translation illuminates cultural assumptions and norms on both sides.

However, I'm still waiting for the great Mao Sound compilation that focuses exclusively on how well these bands adapted 60's beat sounds to Chinese melodies. There are few great examples of this on Teen Dance Music, especially the killer opener by a band apparently called the Love of Apricot Blossom Stream. Who were those guys? It makes me wonder what other treasures lay hidden in W.L.'s brown paper bags...