4 / 10
Ah, the dance/rock crossover. When Lara Croft was first invented, the idea of dance acts with guitarists onstage (or Oakey DJing before the show, if you were U2) was, for a lot of people, still terribly futuristic and exciting. The logic? Putting guitars, something real men like, on something as flimsy as dance music made it proper, just as whacking a bird into a computer game rescued it from the jaws of nerdish loneliness.
Nowadays that crossover - seen in all its glory on the Tomb Raider soundtrack - is, like Bono himself, just faintly embarrassing. So it's no surprise to find U2 doing their usual epic-but-a-bit-dancey stuff with 'Elevation'. Fatboy Slim, meanwhile, hurls himself into aren't-shadowy-elites-cool pseudo-mysticism with 'Illuminati', which at least has some air raid sirens in it; The Chemical Brothers fare rather worse as 'Galaxy Bounce' is a 'will this do?' reworking of 'Hey Boy Hey Girl' which not so much raids tombs as knocks on the door, waits for a bit, shrugs its shoulders and shuffles off.
Among the best tracks are Basement Jaxx's 'Where's Your Head At?' (which we already know is ace 'cos it's on 'Rooty') and Fluke's four-year-old 'Absurd', whose presence here might have been a little more exciting had the song not already appeared in two computer games, two TV ads and a movie. Ironically that staple of the soundtrack album - the act you really wouldn't expect to find on an international blockbuster, who are coincidentally on the label issuing the soundtrack - is the one that comes up trumps. But when East West's Oxide & Neutrino pop up right at the end with the cheerfully demonic 'Devil's Nightmare' and try awfully hard to save the day, it's still a little late.
The album hangs together in the sense that most of the artists involved (who also include Leftfield, Moby, OutKast and Groove Armada) occupy that plane of cool which inadvertently projects itself beyond any target audience and into events like this latest branch of the Lara Croft superbrand. But all told, this is a fairly flimsy compilation whose chief appeal
lies in the fact that it spares us any contribution from Apollo 440.
You may not listen to the dreary ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece while there's a large-breasted alleged babe in a vest stoking the fire, but that's no excuse for chucking it all onto an album. Is it?
Peter Robinson
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