Normally, this would hardly warrant a mention, but in a starved week for singles it rises by default to the top.
A blend of laid back trippy rhythms and country style vocals (think Sneaker Pimps getting stoned with Cowboy Junkies), this is - like sixteen cans of Top Deck - almost intoxicating. Drifting past pleasantly enough, you
wouldn't turn it off the radio if it came on. And there, damned with the merest hint of faint praise, is single of the week for 26th July 1999. Bloody hell - somebody release something half decent, why don't you?
"Lili Marlene" is first b-side, and is a vaguely pleasant US-style folksy shade of summer night sultriness. The "Overflow/Overload" remix is last, and predictably favours the trippy rhythms of the original in the mix,
firing a wide-nozzle spraygun of beats at the poor unsuspecting track causing it to resemble a small and startled woodland animal strapped to a fast-spinning record deck.
Rating: 6/10
The Rest
Science fiction freaks are exactly what Dawn of the Replicants look like in all their publicity photos, and you can imagine them sitting somewhere in a pub in darkest Galashiels, resplendent in their anoraks and Red Dwarf t-shirts having heated debates about whether or not Mr Spock harboured secret homosexual desires for Captain Kirk (he did, you know). And imagining that is just about preferable to sitting through yet another DotR dirge, the likes of which are by now getting decidedly dreary and dull. "You may think that I sold out, but hey - I'm just checking in" they monotonously threaten, at which point this reviewer ran away in panic.
"Buffalo Ballet" is a little better, but this has more to do with it being an old John Cale track than
the Replicants moribund rendition of it. "Yellow Beetle" is probably the best track on offer, with its
stretched out psychedelia, but is still nothing to get all beam-me-up-Scotty'd about.
Rating: 5/10
Imagine a road accident involving Ocean Colour Scene, Cast, Embrace, Shed Seven and Dodgy. Nice thought, isn't it? Anyway, this hideous hairy gibbon-faced spanner of a song is the sonic equivalent of all these bands meeting in a head-on collision; a monstrous melange of all the low-ambitioned mediocrity and musical lack of ambition that the above bands embody. Avoid - or if you can't avoid, ignore.
The b-sides - "As Big As A House" and "If Six Was Eight" - achieve the seemingly impossible feat of being
worse than the a-side.
Rating: 1/10
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