If musical maximalism was a religion, Simon Radcliffe and Felix Buxton would be its drunken papacy. Two men who have spent their career outrunning the disco loop that would try to contain them, each new Basement Jaxx record has been a cowabunga leap forward in an often conservative genre. Where others say go slow, Basement Jaxx says more, now, faster. And loudly. A day-glo spooge of all the best bits from every genre known to man, their last record, 2003's Kish Kash, was a Lisa Frank trapper keeper come to life.
But while the new Crazy Itch Radio is still a rainbow-colored world inhabited by puppy boomboxes and talking unicorns, it's not as concerned with grabbing you by the lapels and shouting "look!" every 15 seconds. My esteemed Pitchfork colleague Tim Finney compared the album to the Avalanches, and like the Australian band's Since I Left You, there's a sparkling glide, a connective boomp, a disco snare that attempts to reign in all of the Jaxx's excesses. It makes Crazy Itch Radio feel less manic than it actually is. If Kish Kash was like Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, this is an Epcot Center monorail trip through Basement Jaxx's record collection.
At the time, I thought Kish Kash was something close to the perfect pop album. It's more like the musical equivalent of playing Katamari Darmacy for eight hours straight or eating an entire bag of fun-size Hershey bars: feels great at the time, but oh that headache/toothache/feeling of recrimination the next day. Maybe I'm just getting older and need more roughage in my diet, or maybe the iPod has rendered the whole concept of "an album as the world's greatest mixtape" irrelevant. Listening to Prince and gypsy music back to back is no longer a big deal, if it ever was.
And yet I'm not 100% keen on the less spazzy Crazy Itch Radio either. Despite the sandblasted smoothness of its surface, Crazy Itch Radio is still very much Basement Jaxx showing off how eclectic they can be. Much of it sounds like the two spent the past three years listening to the roller-boogie bounce of mid-80s r&b and Latin freestyle. And there are certainly worse sounds to revive. Lead single "Hush Boy" takes off from interim single "Oh My Gosh" with sassy female lead vox, bopping b-line, and parping horns. You almost forget it's two middle-aged men trying to be cutesy rather than the puckish sass that comes natural to vulgar teenagers who would think Radcliffe and Buxton were, like, all old and shit.
"Hey You" is the album's standout, a gypsy/klezmer mash-up along the lines of the recent, excellent, and Jaxx-compiled Gypsy Beats and Balkan Bangers compilation. New single "Take Me Back to Your House"-- do yourself a favor and hit up YouTube for the video-- rollicks along to a jangling country house banjo. They're fun little songs, but they're songs that put all the hard work of having personality on the bits and pieces they stole from other countries and cultures. And those who were fans of the old records' ragga dancehall roughness and rave'n'roll noise will have to wait for the inevitable remixes. (Also, fake radio jingles between your songs haven't been a good idea since The Who Sell Out.) But if, as Martin Clark asserted in his recent Month In Grime column, London pirate radio is steady banging to the sound of funky house these days, then Basement Jaxx might have their finger more firmly on the pulse of inner city London than you'd suspect from Crazy Itch.
They're big on groove and three-ring spectacle and cheeky jokes, but songwriting has never been Basement Jaxx's forte. "Red Alert" and "Where's Your Head At?" aren't pop songs, they're tarted-up dance records, and that's probably why they ended up in Coke and Dortios commercials and not on heavy Top 40 rotation. This year's Christina Aguilera and Justin Timberlake singles are very Basement Jaxx-- better, in fact, than anything on Crazy Itch Radio-- and work better as pop songs to boot. And this is the first time it feels like Basement Jaxx is maybe kinda sorta pastiching themselves. Rent-a-diva vocals, a beat that's too fast to be pop and too slow to be house, and a lot of crazy noises…that's so Basement Jaxx, right?
Crazy Itch Radio isn't a bad album by any means; it just doesn't scream "best album of the year" from the moment you put it on. On the other hand, it could be a brand new kind of 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. (It's certainly less front-loaded than their first three records.) We all slow down as we age, and while no one wants to be the old guy in the club in the too-hip T-shirt, the idea of a "mature" Basement Jaxx is an intriguing-- if potentially terrifying-- idea.
