South Central: The Owl of Minerva

South Central is a DJ outfit (and occasional five-piece live band) from Brighton, England with a small list of remixes to their name (biggest act they’ve remixed? — probably Klaxons) and a huge ego. The Owl of Minerva collects all of their previous vinyl-only songs onto CD for the first time. The result is 47 minutes of nonstop dance beats and very little actual songwriting. Their self-written press release touts South Central’s ability to straddle the line between dance music and indie, but adding distorted guitars and occasional vocals to typical thumping electro is hardly a fresh idea. They tend to alternate the guitar-dominated tracks with ones that feature video gamey-sounding synths, but that isn’t exactly an inspired trick, either. “Nothing Can Go Wrong” has a sorta-catchy vocal to it, and other tracks have tiny pieces that may have developed into hooks with a little nurturing. In fact, the entire album only features one truly memorable bit, a synth hook that pops up twice in “Machine” when the dance beat actually drops out briefly. This is decent club music, but it’s woefully short of creativity