After a four year hiatus (you know, since that whole Christopher Walken dancin' around bit) Norman Cook, the Fatboy himself, is back with his newest incarnation Palookaville. Now, call me crazy, but when an artist comes out in the press before their new release and says that "I hate all my other albums. I can't stand listening to them. But this new one is absolutely great, and I love listening to it" inevitably you know they're lying and that their new album sucks balls. But that is exactly what Cook has been saying about Palookaville (dude, you made You've Come A Long Way, Baby; one of the best dance albums of 90's, what were you thinking when you said that?) and for the most part my suspicions were correct, Palookaville isn't all that great.

It doesn't help that Palookaville is bookended by two of worst fucking tracks that Cook has ever pieced together. The opener, "Don't Let The Man Get You Down," is bogged down by the overly repeated line "And the sign says long haired freaky people need not apply" from The Five Man Electrical Band's "Signs" (yeah, Tesla wasn't the originator, can you believe it?) And album closer, "The Joker" is, you guessed it, a dance cover of Steve Miller's token classic. The catch here though is that it's Bootsy Collins singing here instead of Miller, which invariably is pretty cool. The bad part though is that Fatboy's production is so nauseatingly bad, that this version comes out sounding like something BBMak or even worse, someone like LFO would try and tackle.

As bad as some of Palookaville is, there are still a few tracks worth mentioning. "Slash Dot Dash," even with its awful verses of "slash dot dash" repeated over and over, is pretty ingenious due to its guitar and bass work. "Wonderful Night" becomes an excellent hip-hop number with vocals from up-and-comer Lateef, who lends vocals to two tracks here. The other being "The Journey" which laughably enough sounds exactly like MC Hammer's theme song to The Adams Family, but we won't get into that. "Put It Back Together" has terrific vocals from Damon Albarn, which makes sense since Cook produced two tracks on Blur's wonderful Think Tank album. The best track of all though is Fatboy's cover or Babatunde Olatunji's "Jin Go Lo Ba" from one of the best African albums of all time Drums Of Passion. Cook's dance beat goes along nicely with this percussionist's legendary offering.

Ultimately though in the end, what kills Palookaville is Cook's insistence of beating tracks into the ground. Not a single track other than "Slash" is under four minutes long, and the fact that even it feels about eight minutes long doesn't help either. The repetition coupled with Cook's half-interesting ideas, make this the most inessential album so far in Fatboy Slim's otherwise brilliant and successful career.