Bob Sinclar: Born in 69

Derivative, bland and, well, downright execrable, Bob Sinclar shows once more why the French never really got it together in the world of pop music.

The DJ Bob Sinclar.

This is execrable, derivative dance music at its worst. The Frenchman who launched a thousand brainworms with World Hold On (Children of the Sky) and other such cheesy Eurotrash dance anthems, Bob Sinclar - real name Christophe Le Friant, born, contrary to the album's title, in 1967 - has produced yet another masterpiece of blandness. There must be something wrong with the ears of someone who feels that it's OK or even desirable to superimpose a tinny dance beat on Bob Dylan's Mr Tambourine Man or on an "extrapolation" of Manu Chao's Je Ne T'aime Plus. Indeed, it is the original songs pilfered by Sinclar that are the redeeming features of this record, reminding us just how great that Manu Chao track was, or how much we liked Eddy Grant's Electric Avenue (which seems to have been the inspiration for Sinclar's song Jamaica Avenue). In Give Me Some More, the extract of Los Kjarkas's Llorando se Fue - more familiar to modern audiences as the Lambada - is an enjoyable a blast from the past, and at least the teenagers who buy this won't have existing fond memories of the original. The same can be said for The Way I Feel, an apparently pointless reworking of a great 1979 disco track by Adrian Gurwitz, and We Are Everything, yet another cover, this time of a 1968 folk classic by Richie Havens (the latter at least has the benefit of some magical sitar by Narendra Bataju). The low point comes with Belly Dancer, in which a horrible electronic version of an Arabic ney flute sounds almost as crass as Kevin Lyttle's falsetto vocal, singing: "I fell in love with a belly dancer." Save your money for downloading the original tracks that inspired this dreck.