Somebody should have told Bowie you can't sing over breakbeats. The generally-accepted knock on this album is that it sounds like Bowie's singing over a completely unrelated track, and its true. You're not going to be able to keep up unless you're shouting / rapping / generally matching the hard edges (see Chemical Brothers, Prodigy) or keeping it sample-short clipped (take California). If you're showing up with a laconic croon as slow as Bowie's and slap it over galloping boombiddybaps its going to sound like you have no idea what you're doing.
The songs that work, and there's only a few, skip the whole jungle angle. Looking for Satelites rides a triphop groove that actually kind of works, and album highlight Seven Years in Tibet surges in dissonant tensions and bursts in pre-TV on the Radio glory, full of pulsing horns and crashing guitar grind climaxes. The album closes with I'm Afraid of Americans and Earthlings on Fire which belie the incompetence of what came before: they're not great, but at least they seem to have some basic understanding of how to make a song that sounds like a song.
You can't show up and mutter over breakbeats and call it an album. You just can't. Or if you do, you're going to get accused of lazily jumping on the latest sound without innovating on it, let alone getting what it's about, which is pretty much what happened, and rightly so 2.5/5
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