This year is the 20th anniversary of Basement Jaxx's first release, *EP1—*and it's easy to forget how straightforward and underformed it was. But that's the case for just about anything compared to the mindbending pop-house they'd concoct throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s. Remedy, Rooty, and Kish Kash made for such a definitive early-career run that their overloaded, Frankie Knuckles-via-Tex Avery sensibility shone through even when they felt like they were starting to coast. Theirs was a sound that could find a context for Siouxsie Sioux and J.C. Chasez on the same record, hopping between indie-kid nods and marquee pop dreams in a way that highlighted just how across-the-board house music and its offspring could be. Even when 2009 releases Scars and the Zephyr EP threatened to tone them down, there was always an ambush around the corner, like the offbeat engagement with grime and dubstep on their masterful score for 2011 sci-fi cult classic Attack the Block.
But house, garage, and bass music are currently crowded with new-gen acts that owe a lot of their appeal, acknowledged or otherwise, to Jaxx's precedent of sweat-flinging cartoon intensity. And with the records they dropped five years back already hinting at a long goodbye to bombast, Ratcliffe and Buxton seem content to let their heirs pick up the slack, as Jaxx themselves ease into restraint on Junto. This new album's a strange one, albeit in the sense that it's not really strange at all: the closest there is to a left-field guest is Mykki Blanco, whose one verse is played twice on the two-and-a-half-minute "Buffalo"—and if you cut out that track's fleeting hit of scattered d'n'b mayhem, Junto is easily Basement Jaxx's most conservatively minded full-length.
Sure, this album is still recognizably theirs at points. The boogie-shuffle "We Are Not Alone" has some characteristically anarchic burbling squelches trickling through its boogie-shuffle churn. "What's the News" gathers together gelatin-cube bass, dizzy synth chirps, and bongo breaks into the kind of dub-disco cruise that would've fit in nicely in the back half of Remedy. There are still signs of jet-set eclecticism that incorporates pan-Latin salsa/bossa ("Mermaid of Salinas"), UK Afro-Caribbeanisms (the Shakka feature "Rock This Road"), and slickly diced-up '80s funk ("Summer Dem"). And the vocalists, while mostly semi-obscure outside dance music circles, are almost uniformly powerful—with special credit to Meleka, whose surprise-star lead turn on "We Are Not Alone" packs a sly passion that she hinted at while harmonizing with Kelis on Scars' title track. It's a fundamentally sound record as well as one that's easy to move to, never content to stay in one place for too long but not all that scattershot when it comes to going off the experimental deep end.
But let's face it—Basement Jaxx is not a group that's at their best when they just bear down and focus on the fundamentals. Even when Junto showcases them at their best—that'd be the knockout "Unicorn," which is both the liveliest single on the record and their most shameless vintage house throwback since "Do Your Thing"—the sense of adventure is missing. It's a point-missing exercise to shrug at lyrics, of all things, when it comes to dance music—but when there's a precedent of hooks like "I'm too far gone, I've gone too far", "Don't let the walls cave in on you", and "Ain't nothin' goin' on but history/ But it's alright, don't panic" lending an untethered mania to earlier Jaxx classics, the titular refrains of "Power to the People" and "Never Say Never" are relatively lacking in that giddy sense of control loss. And without all the deliberate craziness and cluttered what-next noise that always threatened to overload those jams, what's left, while still danceable and upbeat, seems a little trad. Now more than ever, there needs to be something blatantly neon-bright and iconoclastic enough to offset all the midtempo, gloomy sad-boy house that's thrown current sound systems a bit out of whack. And while Junto is at least happy enough to lift spirits, it feels like they've left it to others to reintroduce anarchy to the dancefloor.
