Even at the height of their popularity in the late 1990s and early 00s, it was always difficult to imagine anyone getting worked up over Thievery Corporation. A watery cocktail of cul de sac genres like downtempo, lounge, and "world music" (more on that in a second), the Washington D.C. duo's output has long worn its own inoffensiveness as a badge. If the fact that the press release for this album ledes with a quote touting them as "quintessential ambassadors of the sophisticated global 'downbeat generation'" doesn't put you on the scent of their relentless dedication to tastefulness, witness 2007's cover album, Versions, whose patently box-ticking tracklist included re-workings of songs by Sarah McLachlan, the Doors, and Astrud Gilberto. Eclectic! Cover albums and mixes aside, Radio Retaliation is the pair's fifth studio album, and finds them once again failing to make anything but the most minute adjustments to the polite groove that is their stock, trade and-- in 2009-- monopoly. These guys have always been producers before songwriters, and, as such, their aesthetic reveals itself not through what they do, but rather, how they do it. Every broody atmosphere pad here is instructively reverbed, every rhythm perfectly loping, every whooshy sound effect painstakingly placed, every bluesy guitar curl appropriately perky, every edge sanded off, each fleck of grit, gristle and emotion dutifully rubbed out and dispensed with. With few exceptions, Radio Retaliation is both perfect and perfectly boring. Queen believed they were put on this earth to rock you; Thievery Corporation appear to have similar goals vis-à-vis anaesthetizing you.
Now: the world music thing. At the very least, one might argue that the spate of travelogue-y lounge and downtempo mixes that lived in those chintzy cardboard cutout displays in major chain record stores around the late 90s and early 00s represented a necessary step forward in the legitimization and mainstreaming of non-Western music. This was before the full impact of the Internet and the MP3, don't forget; all music cost something, and any kind of musical curiosity still represented financial risk. In that climate, the slipstreaming of exotic sounds into mixes by reassuringly familiar DJs provided a degree of indemnity against that risk. So, even despite the fact that they almost always ended up diluting that which they were ostensibly championing, acts like Thievery Corporation provided a unique sort of utility.
In 2009, things are very different, and yet, suspended in amber as Thievery Corporation's sensibilities are, Radio Retaliation's collaborations with Femi Kuti, Seu Jorge, and Anoushka Shankar still have the unfortunate effect of conjuring those weirdly uneven power dynamics. Kuti's track ("Vampires") is easily the best thing here, but it doesn't compare, viscerally, to his own recordings. Meanwhile, Jorge and Shankar's contributions feel like they might as well have been recorded 10 years ago for some tokenistic, upmarket, double-disc dinner party compilation called Global Soundz. If you remember those records, and are perhaps embarrassed that they were even tangentially a part of your life, you might have a similar twinge of unease about hearing someone revive the template now. This is all, of course, in no way meant to suggest that Thievery Corporation are doing anything other than what sounds good to them; sometimes, though, tastefulness is its own worst enemy.
