September 4, 1999

Leftfield : Afrika Shox

[B]'Afrika Shox'[/B] is a worryingly pedestrian piece of work, a burly slab of vocoder electro-funk that falls far short of the melodrama it aspires to generate.

The first taster from Leftfield's painfully overdue second album is already in serious danger of being overshadowed by its notorious video. Which is not so much a tribute to Chris Cunningham's savage imagination as evidence that 'Afrika Shox' is a worryingly pedestrian piece of work, a burly slab of vocoder electro-funk that falls far short of the melodrama it aspires to generate. Still, at least Dave Clarke's flipside remix of stout-commercial soundtrack

'Phat Planet' shows flashes of attitude, amping up the bass-quaking distortion and squishing the beats to putty.

Stephen Dalton