Eastwood by Cuban Boys

Eastwood was the Cuban Boys' one and only major-label album, and it arrived in 2000 after a stretch of delays, trailing in the wake of their lone UK hit, "Cognoscenti vs. Intelligentsia", which EMI had taken to number 4. The English outfit built around Skreen B and Ricardo Autobahn had come up through John Peel's Radio 1 show, and Peel repaid the favor with the sleeve notes here.

The title is a thank-you too: Steve Eastwood, music review editor at Teletext, had covered them early on. The music is what Peel's listeners fell for in the first place: breakneck electronic beats, magpie samples and cut-ups stitched into dance tracks, with the band's own name dropped into the mix again and again like a tag sprayed on a wall. Synth-pop on paper, a sugar-high collage in practice.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.