Either Norman Cook has decided to reveal an unexpected humility, or it's an unfortunate accident: but the title of the third Fatboy Slim album is uncomfortably apt.
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 most highlight the problems. 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.
Leaving him precisely halfway between somewhere and nowhere.
