Fatboy Slim - Palookaville

Once upon a time, I did this review for Worldspace Asia. Seems to be missing from their site right now. I didn’t like it all that much…

Review: Fatboy Slim - Palookaville

Q Magazine once said that this guy is one of the top fifty people you have to see live before you die. He is a man who has made a dance music star out of Jim Morrison - if you haven’t yet listened to the superb Bird of Prey, which features the Doors-frontsman’s sampled vocals, you should. If you’ve ever heard of the phrase “The Rockafeller Skank”, and you find yourself repeating, “Right about now, the funk soul brother, check it out now” whenever you are walking down the road, you know you’ve been affected. It’s a virus, I tell you. The kind of infection that burrows right into your skull and stays there for quite sometime, a virus named Fatboy Slim.

But dance music is hardly the realm Norman Cook (the real-life moniker of the Brighton-based DJ) confines himself to in his latest release Palookaville.  Shades of experimentalism had crept into his previous album Halfway Between the Gutter and The Stars which had yielded only a couple of dance-worthy anthems. Palookaville goes one step further.

Don’t Let The Man, the first track reminds me of Moby’s use of gospel vocals in his Play. This is one of the few tracks that uses a straight-out sample. The band in question being Five Man Electrical Band, whose chorus from their song Signs becomes the hook.

Slash Dot Slash and Jin Go Lo Ba are two tracks that sound like old-school Fatboy Slim. The latter is a dance-hall reworking of a popular Santana tune, and the former is made up of cut-and-paste vocals that sounds like an antiquated tribute to the dot-coms and the Web.

El Bebe Mesoquista is a rollicking pile of funk that starts with an acoustic guitar riff and a whiny voice that flows into an electrically charged beat-fest. Pull It Back Together, featuring the vocals of Blur’s Damon Albarn (whose album Think Tank was co-produced by Fatboy Slim) and The Journey are both out-of-the-way, contemplative tracks, the kind that annoy dance-music purists and make them reach for the fast-forward button.

North-West Three is supposedly a dedication to Zoe Ball, Fatboy Slim’s wife, an optimistic ditty that’s a cross between alternative rock and pop, the kind of jingle best suited for car advertisements.

The album closes with a surprisingly good cover version of the Steve Miller Band’s Joker, with vocals by Bootsy Collins. Probably this song represents the soul of this album - the blurring of genres that Fatboy Slim attempts throughout this work. It all makes sense, the use of real instruments as opposed to electronic blips, the toned down optimism as opposed to the frenetic pace of his earlier albums, the extensive guest-artists that appear in more than two-thirds of the song-list. This is not Fatboy Slim, the superstar DJ. This is Fatboy Slim, the man who wants to break free of the flimsy trappings of superstardom and be known as a serious musician.

Listen to Palookaville not as a dance album, but as you would listen to a fresh artiste and maybe it would make more sense, and give you more value for money.

And yes, at this rate, watching Fatboy Slim live might not be so strenuous, after all.