Slim Skills

ooks like Fatboy Slim won't be heard in any more car commercials for awhile.

Slim (aka Norman Cook), along with scarce company like Moby and the Chemical Brothers, became one of America's most popular electronic artists for one reason: skyscraper-sized hooks, recognizable to even the most musically unengaged members of the population. A listener didn't have to know jack about DJ music to get down with the Funk Soul Brother or hum along to "Praise You."

Halfway Between the Gutter and the Stars is an apt title for a record that finds Fatboy Slim stuck in an uncomfortable hybrid between the big beat accessibility of You've Come A Long Way, Baby and the more straight-ahead house of Better Living Through Chemistry. Trying to employ both catchy hip-hop hooks ("right about now, the funk soul brother") and the adrenalized, beat-focused aesthetic of mainstream house, Slim succeeds at neither. Fatboy has proven the ability to craft a mixed bag of beats that can be all things to all people, but this time, he drops a fat sack of musically incoherent crap on us instead. It's a forced, schizophrenic effort that aches for focus and inspiration, and because it's fighting for acceptance on two fronts, it can't hold water.

Instead, Halfway Between comes off with the worst of both words: his hip-hop comes off rote, his techno, repetitive. Rather than You've Come A Long Way, Baby's seamless presentation, this album feels like a slipshod assemblage, with vocal tracks and hip-hop samples making at-most wary peace with the beats underlying them. Tracks like "Weapon of Choice," "Star 69" and "Drop the Hate" don't come close to Slim's older concoctions. Instead, they're repetitive and annoying, with nary a twist, progression or hook to keep them in your head. "Bird of Prey," the album's first UK single, sticks to more straight-ahead house, with mixed results. Its beat is more reminiscent of Better Living Through Chemistry, cold but engaging, but the vocal, adapted from Jim Morrison's American Prayer poetry album, could be used less often.

The only sensible ploy on this album is Slim's collaboration with Macy Gray, who succeeds in actually infusing "Demon" and "Love Life" with the soul that came naturally to the beatscape of songs like "Praise You" and "Right Here, Right Now" in the past. Macy's appearance is so overpowering, though, that the songs become little more that Fatboyfied remixes of tracks that could as easily have been on her album.

The album's other redeemable moments come on "Mad Flava" and "Ya Mama," both big-beat raveups that won't win any awards for originality but can at least keep people on the floor. Fatboy may think himself a DJ in the company of specialists like Paul Oakenfold or Dieselboy, but he's obviously most adept as a party-anthem champ. Frat party, that is.

Who knows-maybe Fatboy Slim will land another car commercial after all.