- Tijuana Cartel are one of the Gold Coast's biggest musical exports, a fact that has always surprised me a little. Their combination of dance music with a dubby twist folded through it, liberally adorned with world music affectations in flamenco guitar and mariachi horns has always seemed to me the kind of hippie, festival fusion that would have a not particularly huge audience and might even be judged a little ...gimmicky? Whatever, who cares what I think because TC have been dancing it up around Australia with all and sundry jumping on the dance floor under the influence of their world beat. They've taken advantage of the experience too, listening to their latest record M1 shows just how sharp they've become in the honing of their production skills. Yet it appears they haven't been entirely satisfied with their sonic niche either. M1 is definitely a movement into some new sounds and away from those they're more familiar with. The band's Paul George explicitly notes that they've been listening to a lot of Midnight Juggernauts and Presets and it shows: trucking in big slabs of analogue synth, some growly electric guitars and crooning away like it was the mid-80s. Less obviously you can hear they've been experimenting with a bit of British bass music as well, with shuddering stabs of basement shaking acid beats. In fact you can hear a grab-bag of every single one of their tricks both new and old right there on the album's opener White Dove. Later on it seems that some elements fall away and you're left with, well, only the MJ / Presets elements. While they might have absorbed that style I'm not convinced that Tinjuana Cartel have really tweaked it enough to make them a stand-out in that already rather crowded bit of the dance floor. While I wasn't the hugest fan of what they were doing originally (maybe you guessed) it would seem a shame for their fans if TC traded away those elements which made them genuinely distinctive. Not to be too critical, another thing you can get from the album's opener is that when they really bring their fusion to the boil M1 does get the dance floor bouncing.