Send "Basement Jaxx " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Musicomh |
 Out there in between the largers and the popstrels, the chart-scalers and the club-bangers, sit Simon Ratcliffe and Felix Buxton. Under their showbiz nom-de-plume Basement Jaxx they've been turning their disco weaponry into pop gold for over a decade. Since their first proper album (1999's Remedy), the duo have quite literally mashed up genre upon genre in the pursuit of a bangin' choon, and with a previous form that includes classics such as Good Luck, Romeo, Red Alert, Where's Your Head At? and Fly Life, it's something they do very well indeed....full text |
| Allmusic |
| Previewed by "Twerk" -- their booty-disco, "Maniac"-quoting team-up with Yo Majesty -- plus the uplifting perfection of the five-star track "Raindrops" -- sung by member Felix Buxton with Auto-Tune on the assist -- Scars is an obvious return-to-form effort for Basement Jaxx, reigning in the big conceptual ambition displayed on Crazy Itch Radio for better or worse. Getting back to everyday business sounds like sweet relief on tracks like the good-timing "Twerk," and while this is the lunk-headed party theme you'd expect from such a pairing, two of the other marquee-worthy collaborations far exceed expectations. First up is the hot-stepping, Santigold cut "Saga," which suggests that a shared love of the Clash and the Specials was discussed ahead of time. More stunning is the Yoko Ono team-up "Day of the Sunflowers (We March On)" which takes a "Walking on Thin Ice" strategy, supporting Yoko Ono's stark poetry reading with a razor sharp, no wave dance track. The wistful "My Turn" with Lightspeed Champion is like that grand, danceable dreamer that shows up towards the end of the best Pet Shop Boys albums, leaving only the Amp Fiddler effort, "A Possibility," up for debate, since adding new, rather average lyrics to Santo & Johnny's classic instrumental "Sleepwalk" seems an unispired move from this innovative crew. Still, it hardly breaks the album, and there's nothing here you could write off as true filler, but that perfect flow that made their masterpieces so thrilling is missing, plus the increased number of doubtful or regretful numbers referenced by the album's title seems to come from a totally different song cycle than the busy, rump-shaking stunners. Even if this is a bumpier ride than expected, Scars is a worthwhile throwback to the freak attitude that kicked off their career over a decade earlier. Anyone excited by the idea will find plenty to love....full text |
| Popmatters. |
| If They Ever Recover Amazon Lala When we finally getting around to trying to sum up the “sound” of the first decade of the new millennium, all we’ll need is just two words: Basement Jaxx. Now, this isn’t because the Jaxx have conquered the airwaves with hit after ubiquitous hit (hell, the group was dropped from their label Astralwerks after they won a Grammy for their 2004 set Kish Kash), invented entirely new subgenres, or created songs so iconic that every indie-rock group in the world wants to cover them mere seconds after they get released. No, this is a group who’s most mainstream cultural appearance so far has been licensing out some tracks from their 2001 disc Rooty for a couple montage sequences in the film Bend It Like Beckham. Yet when we actually stop for a second and begin thinking about how media has transformed since the advent of the Y2K scare, it’s eerie how much the Basement Jaxx embody so much of what has changed. Napster—taking its last breaths at the start of the millennium—and the P2P revolution wound up changing our very relationship with music (and singles especially), eventually shying the world away from carefully-constructed albums and instead focusing more on the importance of the individual song. As such, singles became star-studded affairs, most newspapers going as far as to alter their “top songs in the nation” lists to include a “featuring” column, simply due to the fact the number of “featured” artists on any given radio hit had damn near tripled in the last 10 years. Genres cross-pollinated at an alarming pace. The floodgates of MP3 culture opened up the door for digital mashups, allowing artists like Dangermouse, Girl Talk, and Hood Internet to fold pop music in on itself, taking the familiar (and sometimes the ridiculously popular) and reinterpreting them in drastic and daring new ways. The dominance of blog culture allowed just about anyone to become their own media outlet, and with all the streaming digital content that is now available to us (for free) with only a few mouse clicks, it seems that our daily culture is more jam-packed with information and entertainment than ever before. It is for this reason that the Basement Jaxx—big beat U.K. dance maestros who cram every single possible sonic idea they can into every square inch of their trademark four-on-the-floor club anthems—sum up the sound of this decade better than just about any other artist....full text |
Basement Jaxx lyrics
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