Rooty

Basement Jaxx have never been purveyors of any kind of pigeon-hole dance music. From early excursions like the ragga-influenced ‘Flylife’ to the anthemic Latin groove ‘Samba Magic’ and especially on the 1999 album Remedy, they’ve always experimented with a varying array of styles and steals.

What makes Basement Jaxx special is that they never let the influences overide the original idea. To take the ‘Red Alert’ single from Remedy as an example, Felix Buxton and Simon Radcliffe managed to funk with a basic garage house formula, adding sirens, screams and a scintillating bassline to produce something that could make the Reverend Ian don some luminous sunscreen and boogie on the beach.

On Remedy, the duo proved that it was possible to mix and marry sounds and even tempos within single tracks, surprising and delighting the listener. But then Basement Jaxx DJ sets have been known to combine tracks as different as ‘Fight The Power’ and ‘Love Is In The Air’. Indeed the inspiration for this new album came from a series of low-key DJ sets the duo performed in a small Irish pub in Brixton. The best news is that Rooty makes Remedy look ordinary.

Opening track ‘Romeo’ is a slice of pure summertime pop that shows exactly why S Club Steps should stop pretending to make music. This is what they’ll never achieve. Again the sirens are back, but the hooks are innumerable: a divine female vocal and melody, a bassline that’s as catchy as influenza and a spacey Hammond keyboard break that’s pure fucking genius.

‘Breakaway’ is all vocoder vocal and Earth, Wind and Fire funk, again made special by a punchy start stop tempo; ‘SFM’ is Destiny’s Child backed by the Chemical Brothers; while ‘Just 1 Kiss’ is the sound of Darryl Hall and John Oates produced by Daft Punk. ‘Broken Dreams’ returns to Latin-land with mariachi horns in a reggae-tempoed slice of sweetness, before we’re whirlwinded into ‘I Want You’ with its frenetic duelling vocal chorus. ‘Get Me Off’ is a low-groove slice of Van Helden house but again we’re flipped out and over by the next track ‘Where’s Your Head At’. This epic piece of punk-funk manages to combine a Jane’s Addiction-like vocal hook with bone-crunching house beats to ecstatic effect. Pure bliss.

‘Freakalude’ segues cleanly into ‘Crazy Girl’, again reminiscent of Mr. Rodgers-Nelson before they give us… go on guess? A swing track, albeit a swing track that’s been pumped, tweaked and noodled into a creature that’s as unlikely and beautiful as a unicorn. We finish with the mellow ‘All I Know’.

The odd thing about this mish-mash of styles and genres is that every track sounds like the ‘Jaxx. If somebody, anybody, releases a finer album than Rooty this year I’ll be as suprised as I am pleased. Go on, do yourself a favour.