King Kong Groover
King Kong Groover is the second and final album by Babylon Zoo, released on 26 February 1999. It met with negative reviews and was a commercial flop. The singles from the album were "All the Money's Gone", which peaked at #46 on the UK Singles Chart, and a cover of Mott the Hoople's "Honaloochie Boogie", which was issued as a promotional single in France (plans for an international release were abandoned). The song "Chrome Invader" was originally called "Silver Surfer" but had to be changed for copyright reasons. The Japanese version of the album includes  two bonus tracks: an acoustic cover of T.Rex's "Cosmic Dancer" and a remix of "The Boy with the X-Ray Eyes". Commercial performance. An "abject failure", "King Kong Groover" sold less than 10,000 copies and did not chart. Critical reception. "King Kong Groover" met with negative reviews. "NME" scored the album one out of ten, calling it a "slickly produced machiavellian plundering of pop classics" and a "clumsy effort to resurrect a career that was a fluke in the first place." In the "Scotland on Sunday", Colin Somerville awarded the record one star out of five. He argued that  Bikini Machine plagiarises The Beatles' "Across the Universe", and concluded: "Sadly lacking in anything even remotely approaching originality, "King Kong Groover" is the sound of a career spinning into terminal decline." "Dotmusic" felt that none of the songs match the "futuristic kick" of Babylon Zoo's 1996 debut single, "Spaceman". Some critics offered scant praise. Caroline Sullivan of "The Guardian" wrote that bandleader Jas Mann is "shrill and fun, but lacking the depth to take him beyond 'Spaceman'." In the "Sunday Tribune", Anna Carey described "King Kong Groover" as "sub-Bowie" and "stupid", and "Manhattan Martian" a "piss-poor rip  off of 'Starman'." She allowed, however, that the record is "hard to hate". Kevin Courtney of "The Irish Times" found the record to be a marked improvement over predecessor "The Boy with the X-Ray Eyes" (1996), but noted that despite its "[aspirations] to "Ziggy Stardust"-era elevation, Babylon Zoo are still tied down by too many threadbare ideas". In a favourable retrospective review, AllMusic's Dave Thompson said that while there is "nothing in sight to even approach the peaks that their debut hit 'Spaceman' attained", the album has "yearning majesty" and "neo-operatic flair". "Virgin Encyclopedia of Nineties Music  author Colin Larkin was mildly positive, but remarked that Mann's full-on adoption of glam rock... appeared too late to cash in on the attendant furore surrounding Todd Haynes' genre tribute, "Velvet Goldmine"." Track listing. All tracks written by Jas Mann except where noted.