I was pissed it took PR so long to get me this one, not just because I knew it’d be a great album for summer beach drives but also because for a long time now my money’s been on this crew to deliver the best all-purpose party-album of the millennium and I wanted to see if I was right, which, wouldn’t you know, I was (I can’t with good conscience give the nod to Teddybears, what with all the instant cred they get from the stars they drag into the studio to help them out — why does every giant new mega-album have to have 50,000 ‘feat’ guests making little difference aside from screwing up the continuity?). Led by grown-up gay-performance-artist Jake Shears and his butchy sidekick Ana Matronic, the band itself boldly goes to the final frontier (of this cultural era anyway), providing a clinic on upfitting sheer ’70s funk (“Baby Come Home”), disco Bee Gees (“Inevitable”) and kinky “Kiss”-era Prince (“Keep Your Shoes On”) with the accoutrements of the day, such as irresistible futurepop (“Only the Horses”) and line-dancing tribal-house (“Let’s Have a Kiki”). My music-critic Clinton Kelly side can’t help but pop out upon beholding such perfection, like I found myself thinking things like “Yup, look at that, a little splash of dubstep. Love. It.” A+ —Eric W. Saeger