Sometimes it's nice to ditch all the stylish genre nonsense (broken beat, micro-house, post-rock-psychedelic folktronica) and just listen to some music whose only goal is to put a smile on your face and get you dancing. The second album from Jonas Ture Sjoberg, also known as Beatfanatic (or Beatconductor or Southside Break Crew – he's got a bit of a name fixation himself), is just the ticket.

Sjoberg hails from Mad Mats's Raw Fusion camp in Sweden, and his first single, the Afro-Rican breakbeat jam "Cookin'," was the label's biggest success in 2003, landing on compilations from hip-hop head Bobbito and cocktail connoisseurs Thievery Corporation. Then came his first album, Adventures in No-Fi, named for a decidedly low-tech approach to production, and here comes Sjoberg again with a frothy album of breaks, beats, and huge hooks. Building songs straight from loops and samples, Sjoberg always keeps his eye on the groove. Just feel the moody strings, three vibraphone notes, and slap bass on "Down" as they build to a simple four-line vocal guaranteed to echo around your mind long after you leave the floor. Or strut along with the disco drums, party shouts, and spiraling flute on "Boom Bangin" as you remember how much fun unpretentious dance music can be. (Peter Nicholson)

Zion-I
True and Livin' (Live Up)

You have to respect Zion-I for smoothly sliding against the perpetual party grain of the moment. The cool, lyrical trumpet limning the nodding beat, weaving in and out like a ghost, on "Doin' My Thang" says it all – MC Zion and beatmaker Amp Live's thang, their comfort zone, tends toward downtempo and uneffortful, toward clean, jazz-oriented sounds. The track's testimonial is front-loaded with nostalgia for Too $hort, "big tits," new dance steps, and a certain organicism, though Zion has to say they chose not to become doctors or psychologists and took a life of rhyme, rolling with gamblers and "moving slo-mo" instead. And slow is right – most of the duo's third album, True and Livin', is low-key, contemplative, and relatively abstract, despite some energetic contributions by Gift of Gab, Del, and Aesop Rock (who appears on the anticonsumerist "Poems 4 Post Modern Decay"), even as Zion-I confess their true love – hip-hop – with bare-faced sincerity on "Bird's Eye View." The pair obviously look to a golden age for cues and clues, but at moments, you wish they would rouse themselves more often, as they do on the spacey yet pointed "Heads Up," and take their music touchstones out of the past and into a future, however uncertain it may be. Zion-I play Fri/22, Slim's, S.F. (415) 522-0333. (Kimberly Chun)