by Ted MillsA year after the breakthrough This Year's Girl, the Pizzicato Five once again transformed, this time into a sleek house music machine, releasing Sweet Pizzicato Five, a collection of sparse grooves over which Nomiya Maki becomes a disco diva. The result is mixed -- for every Flower Drum Song, a seven-minute spacy echo of a song, there's a Catchy or a KDD, which overstay their welcomes at over seven minutes each. The record is surprisingly free of the genre-bending inventiveness that usually marks their work. Still, the stomping Tout Va Bien is a fine song, as is Takanami's Cosmic Blues. The songs' potential didn't go to waste, however -- the hard-to-find vinyl only Pizzicato Free Soul album features some terrific remixes, which turned up later on other releases.