Paul Oakenfold: Bunkka : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

American record labels and the producers who work for them have been attempting to crossbreed techno and pop music for years, usually by spot-welding pop singers onto throbbing electronic grooves. In that tradition, Bunkka is the sound of DJ superstar Paul Oakenfold diversifying his portfolio and collecting some melodic options. The guest-star appearances range from annoying (Nelly Furtado's nasal honk over "Harder They Come") to lush (Carla Werner's deliciously soaring bit on "Southern Sun"), but the album works because Oakenfold has abandoned the stylistic limits of trance yet brought the genre's tuneful oomph to tracks with a little more personality. On "Get Em Up," as Ice Cube hilariously bellows, "In the book of life, there's only two women/Big old good ones, and good old big ones," Oakenfold acts like a hip-hop DJ gone synthetic, unspooling a slow, strange loop that turns out to be the theme from The Exorcist. Separately, both Cube's rap and Oakenfold's roll would be cliches, but melded together they give an eerie fatalism to this parable about a man caught in the gears of his own desires. It's a poetic splice of hip-hop and techno, and possibly a sound with a future.

PAT BLASHILL
(RS 899/900 - July 4, 2002)