Crazy Itch Radio
“I love music,” the O’Jays once sang, “just as long as it’s groovin’.” Basement Jaxx take that credo to heart, expanding it to prove that anything they like can co-exist with their club-ready beats. “Just put a record on, maybe a country song,” sings Vula Malinga to a potential conquest on “Take Me Back to Your House,” over a plucking banjo that’s eventually met by a marching band’s drumline and ’70s-vintage disco strings. (None of which undercuts the song’s emotional fragility.) “Hey U” starts as epic Western-movie music before visiting a Bollywood soundstage with a klezmer band who’ve hitched a ride. And “Run 4 Cover” suggests prolonged exposure to Nortec Collective’s blend of traditional Mexican forms and techno. Best of all, none of this ever feels forced; it’s the soundtrack of a kicky tour demonstrating that all the world’s a dance floor.
After three records of musical maximalism, Simon Radcliffe and Felix Buxton unveil a new kind of Basement Jaxx album: A grower, one that doesn't exhaust you the first time around the track but one that accrues meaning and gets more enjoyable with each new spin.
Of the seemingly hundreds of sound-sources at work in Basement Jaxx songs, the horns are most liable to blow things wide open. The beats are a given, and the vocals always smoke, but the horns command something grander in the way they make good on the ideas of parades that are otherwise merely implied in the typical…
<p><strong>Emma Warren</strong> is impressed by two very different dance sets, both stuffed to the brim with unusual guest stars.</p>
Crazy Itch Radio’s not the Sign O’ The Times that Rooty fans have been waiting for, but it’s a more-than-serviceable Lovesexy.