Bunkka

The techno boom was one of the greatest cons perpetrated in recent pop culture, druggy bubblegum that always lost its flavour on the bedpost overnight.

Don’t mind me, I’m just playing heretic for the hell of it. But you have to wonder if the pet sounds favoured by the likes of Paul Oakenfold became devalued by too many cheap dance copyists, overpaid DJs, kneejerk remixes and Big Brother themes.

However, Oakenfold has to be given much more than the time of day, not just ’cos he ranks so high in the technocracy, but because 15 years into the plot he’s stepped out behind the decks and come up with Bunkka, his first album as a song structuralist rather than all-star A&R man, soundtrack scorer and Balearic boffin.

But for all that he’s no singer, so these 11 tracks feature cameos that range from the sublime (Ice Cube, Nelly Furtado and Tricky) to the ridiculous (Asher D of So Solid Crew, Shifty Shellshock of Crazy Town) to the sublimely ridiculous (Perry Farrell, Hunter S. Thompson).

But you just can’t judge the tracks by the guestlist. In fact, some of the best stuff comes out of the mouths of unknowns like Carla Warner, Tiff Lacey and Emiliana Torrini. Songs such as ‘Southern Sun’ and ‘Hypnotised’ get close to spiritual as well as chemical ecstasy; Bjorkian vocals, retro NY Baker-beats, Hook-y basslines, soaring washes of sound. Next to these, ‘Ready Steady Go’ (with Asher D), and ‘Time Of Your Life’ (Farrell) come off like outtakes from Prodigy’s Fat Of The Land. Contrast and compare with the cinemascopic sweep of ‘Zoo York’ – no contest.

Sometimes though, the moonlighters really hit the mark. Hunter S. Thompson’s idiosyncratic drawl on ‘Nixon’s Dream’ opens up a whole realm of spoken-word album possibilities (“This is not a generational thing/You don’t even have to know who Richard Nixon was to be a victim of his ugly Nazi spirit”) and on ‘Get ’Em Up’, Ice T’s rantings are slyly counterpointed by an Exorcist lift. But the real peach is Furtado and Tricky doing angel/devil dialogue in the closing ‘The Harder They Come’ (not the Jimmy Cliff anthem, but in the same class), up there with David Arnold for filmic elegance.

A mix tape, sure, but Oakenfold manages to prove that you can be both a song and dance man.