Oh fuck me sideways. Why do I have to listen to more shit by Fatboy Slim? Why do I have to listen to any more albums put out by DJs? And why the fuck does a Fatboy Slim album have to be 70 minutes long? This is gonna hurt. I already know it. But I can't just skip it. I have to endure it.
Holy crap, for a dance album this is really flat and lifeless. There's nothing clever about the beats or samples or digital effects. I know I'm only 1.5 songs in and I wasn't expecting much, but this isn't even annoying enough to register. It's just a standard drum track, a simple pattern which might only consist of one digitized note played to a beat, and the occasional sound effect. There are no lyrics, as if anyone really wanted to hear Fatboy Slim sing.
Basically every song wants to be the backing track to an action scene in a movie. Unless it's a slow song, in which case it wants to be part of a scene where a badass guy struts through and alley way while a bunch of gangsters shoot him tough guy looks or whatever. Instead of being 15 seconds long these songs in some cases are 7 minutes long. So that one 15 second chunk of music that would be used to effectively establish the badass quality of that movie character just repeats endlessly.
I'm pretty sure if a DJ actually tried to play music like this at a party he or she would be immediately fired. I might not particularly care for dance music, but I appreciate that the people who do want their music to at least have a certain amount of energy to them. Unfortunately this album literally put me to sleep. These tracks have very dull bass, which makes them sound really hollow as pure dance tracks. Maybe if a DJ were to play this album at a rave he or she could add another canned bass track underneath. Would kind of defeat the purpose of a DJ coming out with a canned version of their work.
The penultimate track is called "Michael Jackson". It's exactly the same as all the other songs on the album except it includes somebody saying "Michael Jackson" repeatedly throughout. Later in the album the same guy starts saying "Tina Turner". I don't really see the connection, except both names are four syllables. I also wonder why the name of the song is "Michael Jackson" and not "Michael Jackson/Tina Turner", unless Tina Turner is supposed to be like the surprise celebrity cameo at the end of this piece of shit.
The only positive I can figure from this album, as opposed to You've Come A Long Way, Baby, is that at no point during Better Living Through Chemistry does Fatboy Slim tell us that he's awesome. So at least I'm not angry. Just really fucking bored. 1 star.
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