Better known as an electronic dance music producer these days, Steve Aoki’s career has traversed punk and hardcore and places in between.

Here he turns to his first love, hip-hop, although he manages to infuse the genre’s tropes with enough EDM glitches and breakdowns to keep things on the good side of awry.

Obsessed with the in-your-face brio of West Coast rap (N.W.A., Eazy-E, Dr. Dre ...) here he acts as a vehicle for no shortage of lyricists’ bravado, including T-Pain, who invokes Queen’s We Are the Champions on the chorus of  Lit, complete with psychotic, distorted effects.

The problem is, there is  a little too much of the same,  some tracks  sounding more tired than virile.

• Steve Aoki. Kolony. Liberator. 

• Three and a half stars (out of five)

Single download: How Else
For those who like: Ice T

— Shane Gilchrist