by John Bush
One year following the entry of &Aftermath& into the British charts, Nightmares on Wax released a first full-length that rivalled any other techno debuts of the time, excepting only its immediate predecessor in the Warp catalog -- LFO's Frequencies. The &Aftermath& blueprint (skeletal bleep techno with the dark undercurrents cropping up in much post-rave techno) is in full force on several tracks, like the follow-up club hit &Dextrous& and the depth-plumbing bass of &A Case of Funk.& Elsewhere, though, NoW expand the sound of bleep in several intriguing directions: &Coming Down& represents with paranoid breakbeats wrapped around a minimalist framework; &Playtime& sounds reminiscent of Soul II Soul; &How Ya Doin'& is a great old-school shout-out track; and &Mega Donutz& brings a British spin to playful American hip-hop like De La Soul. Unjustly relegated to the history bins (and even more of a relic because of its radical differences from the later NoW catalog), A Word of Science is much more than just the other great early Warp LP.