 The Italian Fatboy Slim? Not quite - and after Between The Gutter And The Stars that isn't such a flattering comparison. What we do have is a stack of dancefloor friendly cuts that touch on funk, disco, hip-hop and house - heavy on the samples, light on the handbags. So DJ Stefano Fontana is not so much another Mr Cook as another practitioner of the high-gloss Euro-chic popularised by Daft Punk and their brethren.
In fact Man Music Technology covers a lot of ground that's familiar if you've ever heard Discovery - and just like that album, this CD has a little too much filler and not enough killer . . . Man Music Technology has got to be taken as a whole, because there aren't a lot of tracks here that would stand out as great singles.
Vinylstyloz tips its hat to Air, while Soulreply tries way too hard to ape Daft Punk's One More Time. Way Of Life is a nice rap led, daisy age-chilled outing, but breaks no new ground.
All Nite Long comes as close to sampling Abba as you can without getting slapped with a lawsuit. Fontana gets 'inspired' by Gimme Gimme Gimme here, without ever crossing that all-important line. If you want to know exactly where that line is located, Lo-Fidelity Allstars might be able to give you a few pointers . . .
Oddly enough, the nicest bits of Man Music Technology are hidden at the end. The back-tracked synths of Game Over give the cut an originality which is missing from a lot of the material here, while the chopped-up vocal loop of the single If Everybody In The World Loved Everybody In The World makes like the Italian Fatboy Slim - which is just about where we came in . . . :: Rowan Shaeffer |
