For those who were hoping to sit out the Cocktail Revolution, this disc offers a final salvo that effectively obliterates the walls of hip resistance. Pour a tall one and submit. Forsaking the usual sample sources, Tim Digulla and Dave Gardner have deconstructed, reconstructed, and resurrected the tiki-tinged, Latinesque sounds of Loungeland into an album that seems both fresh and oddly familiar—but satisfyingly odd. Mellow marimbas, insistent bongos, and tropical ambience have been retrofitted into modern beats and arrangements. In the process, the often lifeless quality of the original studio tracks has been replaced with a lively conviction. This is the logical extension of Esquivel’s sonic experiments, and titles like “Space Golf,” “Nude on the Moon,” “Liquordelic,” and “El Bombo Atomico” perfectly describe the resulting pastiches. Gardner is quoted as saying, “Easy Listening was where I really began to understand melody. It’s where pop finally made sense to me.” Though its inspiration is several generations distant, Tipsy should make sense to most discriminating moderns.

—Dave Nuttycombe