*** Fatboy Slim

ON THE FLOOR AT THE BIG BEAT BOUTIQUE

(Astralwerks)

Although it offers no new material, On the Floor at the Big Beat Boutique should keep Fatboy Slim fans happy till autumn, when his next album comes out. Recorded live at the Big Beat Boutique in Brighton, England, On the Floor is an energy-charged documentation of his gloriously unpretentious live sets, which are notorious for cheekily blending everything from classic hip-hop to thumpin' house to jacked-up remixes of Prince and Cornershop. Deftly cross-fading between pre-school funk classics (Michael Viner's Incredible Bongo Band's "Apache"), acid-house phreakouts (CLS's "Can You Feel It?"), and a couple of his own big-beat barnstormers ("Michael Jackson" and "The Rockefeller Skank"), Fatboy Slim lives up to his reputation as a genre-blurring and party-starting DJ. His crowd-pleasing mix of coked-up breakbeats, body-rock shout-outs, and monsters of rock riffs may never please dance-music snobs, but the rest of us will continue to groove.

-- Michael Endelman