In a recent post to his blog on the New Yorker website, the critic Sasha Frere-Jones made a case for his poor track record in predicting public taste by pointing out that he had Basement Jaxx, not Daft Punk, pegged to be a major crossover act at the start of the decade. His reasoning was that, while Daft Punk mined a fairly narrow robot-funk aesthetic, Basement Jaxx emphasized human voices and cherry-picked sounds from a wide range of genres, which should logically open them up to a broader audience. The opposite was true. Whereas Daft Punk's M.O. was consistent and instantly understood, Basement Jaxx's style was constantly shifting and lacked a public face. The duo may have produced some of the most transcendentally brilliant dance music of the decade, but their eclectic taste and resistance to shtick may well have kept them from attaining widespread commercial success.
Basement Jaxx's aesthetic is easy to intuit, but difficult to describe. The word "maximalist" gets thrown around a lot, but that implies a musical overkill that belies Felix Buxton and Simon Ratcliffe's talent for precisely calibrating their tracks for an over-the-top boldness. Their most memorable songs-- "Where's Your Head At?", "Romeo", "Lucky Star", "Red Alert"-- are pummeling, relentless pleasure machines, and even when they dial it down for a melancholy tune like "Take Me Back to Your House", the duo still aim for an overwhelming effect. Scars, their fifth album, mostly falls into this latter category, and the results are mixed. Fans hoping for some good ol' Jaxx floor-fillers will almost certainly be disappointed, as only the first single "Raindrops" fully delivers the blissful catharsis of their best-known hits. The remainder of the album lingers in a sad-eyed funk even when the group is clearly shooting for fun, uptempo party tunes.
The most successful songs on Scars foreground the romantic anxiety that permeates the entire album. "Feelings Gone", featuring vocalist Sam Sparro, and "My Turn", a collaboration with Lightspeed Champion, both expand upon the lovesick sound of Crazy Itch Radio's "Take Me Back to Your House", but jettison that song's quasi-country affectations and air of lonely desperation in favor of bright, buoyant arrangements similar to their more upbeat numbers. There is a potent sadness in these tracks, but any trace of self-pity is overshadowed by the way the vocal performances and the sound of the music come together as an open-hearted plea for affection and understanding. These two songs, along with the more mellow cuts "A Possibility" and "Stay Close", invert the expectations of Jaxx music, but play to the duo's strengths as composers. They may not overload the listener with euphoria, but the songs evoke a powerful emotional urgency, and that more than anything else defines Buxton and Ratcliffe's best work.
This is evidence of true artistic growth, but these successes share space on Scars with creative cul-de-sacs and uninspired genre exercises. The title track establishes the dark tone of the album, but it is almost too effective in the way it applies the Jaxx production aesthetic to conjure nausea-inducing anxiety. The Santigold showcase "Saga" falls into a similarly tense zone, but its overly dense ragga is saved by the bounciness of its catchy, taunting refrain. These are fine pieces of work, but they are more interesting than pleasurable. Nevertheless, when the two try for uncomplicated, pleasurable dance anthems, the results are rote and boring. "What's a Girl Gotta Do?" comes off like a second-rate retread of "Do Your Thing" from Rooty, the Yoko Ono collaboration "Day of the Sunflowers (We March On)" is energetic but joyless, and "Twerk", their team-up with Yo Majesty, hinges on an interpolation of "Maniac" from the Flashdance soundtrack that is far too cheap and easy for a group capable of so much better than kitschy nostalgia. As much as "Feelings Gone" and "My Turn" emote with genuine feeling, these songs seem distracted and unfocused, as if Buxton and Ratcliffe are going through the motions while their hearts and minds are somewhere else entirely.
All of this highlights perhaps the most crucial difference between Daft Punk and Basement Jaxx: While Daft Punk have not budged from an image established in the late 1990s, have released only three studio albums over the past 13 years, and have been mostly coasting on the success of a record from 2001, Basement Jaxx have never been still for long, and seem entirely unafraid of failure. They are constantly striving and experimenting, and when you're brave enough to take artistic risks, you're bound to turn out a dud here and there. All of Basement Jaxx's missteps to date have been noble in ambition and easily forgiven when you take into account that the same impulses that produce an awkward misfit of a song like "She's No Good" also yield the glorious house psychedelia of "Raindrops". Basement Jaxx may not have a strong brand identity, but their eagerness to toy with their formula and broaden the emotional range of their material is truly inspiring, and sometimes that matters much more than being popular and influential.
