This album is the album to buy at the moment! Believe me. I have brought all of fatboy slims albums but this one has to be the best. Particularly when accompanied by its Ibiza compilation-style sleeve images and the '50s US test pilot video for first single, the Jim Morrison-sampling 'Bird Of Prey', 'Halfway Between The Gutter And The Stars' is clearly meant to evoke flight and movement. The added implication being, of course, that this is music that soars. And, in parts, that's just what Cook's latest cycle of sampladelic creations achieves. There's a type of mood you sometimes find yourself in where something as dreamily trance-centric as 'Bird Of Prey' seems particularly fitting.
But unless that's where your head happens to be at, much of this album fails to engage. That location the title hints at seems to be less a rarefied stratosphere of limitless possibilities than an indecisive middle ground between being one thing or another. There are lengthy attempts at covering too many bases, when fewer distractions would have allowed Cook to create music with direction, not just location and motion.
'Love Life', one of two tracks featuring cartoon-voiced nu skool soul diva Macy Gray, is a case in point. Knowing what his listener is expecting, Cook retreats into a minimal Prince-like groove, dropping squelchy Hammond figures in at each of the tune's angles as new samples are layered in with robotic, mathematical precision.
There are some great things here, all the same: 'Ya Mama', a hark back to those Big Beat Boutique sessions, is all spilt lager and guitar-guided shouty mayhem. And 'Weapon Of Choice', a polyrhythmic collage of disparate musical sources, is wonderful, a cacophonous symphony of inexplicable funkiness.
But it's the heavily accented "big songs" - the closers 'Demons' and the bloated 11-and-a-half minute 'Song For Shelter' - that bring out the best in Norman. There's a commendable, understandable ambition at work, Cook sensing that both he as a musician and big beat as a genre, if it exists at all any more, need to produce something of weight and gravity if they are to be taken seriously and manage to move forward.
But Fatboy Slim is not DJ Shadow, and his music exists for very different reasons. And in reaching for this higher ground, Cook risks losing the dancefloor-centred fun that's made his Fatboy Slim music so infectiously effective, but the risk he took and man did he pull it off!
Leaving him precisely halfway between somewhere and the top.
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Fatboy Slim has come a long way since his debut album, Better Living Through Chemistry, ... more
saw him bring big beat to the masses. His first offering of the new millennium, Halfway Between the Gutter and the Stars was his most ambitious project to date. Mar...
Postage & Packaging: Free! Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours...
Fatboy Slim has come a long way since his debut album,Better Living Through Chemistry, saw ... more
him bring big beat to the masses. His first offering of the new millennium,Halfway Between the Gutter and the Starswas his most ambitious project to date. Marrie...
Postage & Packaging: £1.21 Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days...
Fatboy Slim has come a long way since his debut album,Better Living Through Chemistry, saw ... more
him bring big beat to the masses. His first offering of the new millennium,Halfway Between the Gutter and the Starswas his most ambitious project to date. Marrie...
Postage & Packaging: £1.21 Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days...
Fatboy Slim has come a long way since his debut album, Better Living Through Chemistry, ... more
saw him bring big beat to the masses. His first offering of the new millennium, Halfway Between the Gutter and the Stars was his most ambitious project to date. Mar...
Postage & Packaging: Free! Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours...
Fatboy Slim has come a long way since his debut album, Better Living Through Chemistry, ... more
saw him bring big beat to the masses. His first offering of the new millennium, Halfway Between the Gutter and the Stars was his most ambitious project to date. Mar...
Postage & Packaging: Free! Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours...
Advantages: Half decent tracks featuring Macy Gray, with Demons being the undoubted highlight Disadvantages: Overall its quite dull compared to his previous efforts
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May 16th, 2001
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