Miami Herald/Ft Worth Star Telegram's Review of the new Basement Jaxx

[Blake]

Taken from Herald.com/Fort Worth Star Telegram:

Basement Jaxx turns the beat around
EVELYN McDONNELL
emcdonnell@herald.com

Basement Jaxx made a believer out of me.

I was a dance-music skeptic. And not because I'm a typical double-left-footed, rhythm-challenged rock-snob critic. I've spent thousands of hours at clubs, alternately trying to come up with the best moves and losing my ego in strobe-light communion, on my feet until I'm dizzy and dripping and delirious. (There's a reason the dance-floor drug of choice is called Ecstasy.)

But: I love to dance to songs. The repetitive beat of disco and its descendents has always seemed monotonous. I like it when the DJ mixes it up, makes my feet change rhythms and my heart sing melodies. Techno seems robotic. Trance, sleepy. In fact, I think these genres are mislabeled dance music: They're more about being a one-groove soundtrack for a psychedelic experience than about shaking your tail-feather. Hip-hop, that's dance music. Even rock has a better beat, and you can dance to it, than a lot of the sounds that have dominated South Beach nightlife for years. Why do you think Stairway to Heaven was a prom favorite for so long?

RAVE SCENE

I covered the rave scene in San Francisco in 1991, long before most of my colleagues caught the bpm bug. But it was more like a string of hippie be-ins than a sock hop.

So the first time I came to Winter Music Conference -- 1997, I believe -- I was waiting to be converted. Still a New Yorker back then, I was mostly happy to be in sunny Miami. I remember watching Fatboy Slim at the Cameo, performing in front of images of monster-truck rallies and buxom women, and thinking, OK, Fratboy Slim is the aural equivalent of beer-calendar mania. And? I was relieved every time I found a hip-hop room off to the side of the main rooms, and could get my groove back.

Then, at about 3 o'clock one morning, in the tiny, crowded upstairs of some club whose name I've forgotten, the English duo Basement Jaxx started spinning.

Felix Buxton and Simon Ratcliffe threw everything into the mix: New wave, pop, rap, Prince. House was the base, but they weren't dogmatic. They pumped up the rhythm by being playful and provocative with it, not by being its slave.

"We like heaving, funky music," Ratcliffe told me over the phone from Brixton, England, last week. "European music tends to be robotic and regimented. We like a bit of madness."

Basement Jaxx became my favorite beat jackers, the act I had to catch at every WMC, which I have since attended faithfully. (When my 2-week-old baby kept me from last year's festivities, I was selfishly glad that Basement Jaxx was sitting the conference out, too.)

Rooty, the Jaxx's second album, released in 2001, was an almost-perfect disc. "Romeo" was my summer hit, a power pop song for the year dance music was supposed to, finally, break through.

Until Osama Bin Laden crashed the party.

It was hard to listen to Rooty's gravity-free embrace of fun after 9/11. It was hard for the Jaxx to make that music, too.

"All those thing definitely affect you, affect the global subconscious," Ratcliffe recalled. "It affects everyone's spiritual emotions, whether you face it or not."

Kish Kash, Basement Jaxx's third album, released last week, reflects a changed world. "It's slightly darker, more tense," Ratcliffe says. "People say it's less Ecstasy, more heroin."

Opening track "Good Luck" is a tremendous '70s-style soul rave-up, sung by Lisa Kekaula of the California band the Bellrays. But it's also a see-you-later kiss-off to an ex-lover. "Cish Cash" features goth queen Siouxsie Sioux muttering cynicisms. For some fans, the Jaxx's employment of 'N Sync's J.C. Chasez on "Plug It In" may be the darkest moment of all.

"It's an odd collaboration," Ratcliffe conceded. "But for us, the most important thing is if the song works."

Basement Jaxx approached Kish Kash differently from their other records. They wrote with guitars and other instruments, instead of building on samples. Ratcliffe and Buxton were bored with dance music. "It personally felt like time to try something different," Ratcliffe said. "It's good to push things and explore new territory."

NO EXCITEMENT?

Unorthodoxy has always been Basement Jaxx's modus operandi. But what once felt like bricolage now feels slightly shattered.

Ratcliffe's not sure if they'll be at WMC this year. "The thrill wore off a bit," he said. "The music was repetitive. People didn't seem that excited. It lost a bit of steam."

I think he's wrong. I think there's going to be some new events at this year's dance-music gathering that may make it better than ever. But I certainly know what he means.

Then again, Basement Jaxx recorded a song called Red Alert during the Kosovo crisis. "It was a weird, scary, uncomfortable, sad time," Ratcliffe said. "This is awful, but this is part of history; it's always going to be. The world will carry on. Music is a testament to that, to people fighting on, to energy."