Additional personnel: Yo Majesty, Fat Lip (rap vocals); Cate Le Bon, Spank Rock.

An extension of Gruff Rhys's guest appearance on Boom Bip's BLUE EYED IN THE RED ROOM, Neon Neon finds the two performers delving deep into 1980s culture for a concept album about high-rolling car manufacturer John DeLorean. While a few tracks feature hip-hop luminaries (most notably Spank Rock and Fatlip), most tunes on STAINLESS STYLE are fascinating simulacra of synth-laden `80s pop tunes, best shown on the propulsive "I Told Her on Alderaan" and the bouncy "Raquel." Although fans of Rhys's day job--the Super Furry Animals--and Boom Bip's more subdued work may be initially perplexed, the collaboration is a highly entertaining exercise in STYLE.

Reduced to a cold, hard synopsis, Neon Neon's Stainless Style sounds like a joke. A collaboration between Super Furry Animals singer/songwriter Gruff Rhys and Los Angeles underground hip-hop/electronic producer Boom Bip, Neon Neon sounds like an unlikely pair on paper and they've made their partnership even stranger by creating a concept album about John DeLorean, the automobile industry maverick who was as notorious for his futuristic designs as for his 1982 arrest for drug trafficking, a charge he later beat yet which gave him a stigma he couldn't shake. It's a quintessential '80s tragedy which provides Neon Neon an opportunity to craft a quintessentially '80s tribute, something they deliver with startling accuracy on Stainless Style. Apart from the cuts where Spank Rock, Yo Majesty and Fatlip are brought in -- their presence dictates a harder, modern production from Boom Bip -- the album is so precise in its re-creation of the gleaming glitz of the go-go Reaganomics era that it could be mistaken as a relic from 1983, but the remarkable thing about Stainless Style is that there's not a sliver of irony underneath the cold shimmer of all of its analog synths and chorused, echoed guitars. There is humor here -- sly, knowing humor, as there should be with offhand references to Star Wars, Raquel Welch and Michael Douglas, along with deliberate allusions to early electro and tight, tuneful new wave pop -- but this isn't camp, as there's a surprising melancholy flowing beneath the transparently shallow surfaces on "I Told Her on Alderaan" and "Raquel." Even with those trace elements of sadness, Stainless Style is hardly a heavy album: there's just enough weariness to the music to give it emotional pull, but the chief attraction of this tight 12-track concept album is how Neon Neon has created an album that isn't so much a straight-up replica of '80s excess as one that puts all of that indulgence into perspective, both emotionally and musically. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine