Basement Jaxx
Remedy

THE REVIEW

Ratcliffe and Buxton are two superb circus bonhomme in their madness, all intent on subverting, on punkifying the cheesiest and handbaggiest house canons.
The electronic circus they present – ladies and gentlemen - in “Remedy” is, for the chemical generation, the house equivalent of that musical re-styling operation done with hip hop by the Chemical Brothers, with ragga by Jon Carter or the Freestylers, with techno by the Prodigy.
That is, they take an already codified musical genre, stuff it with straight and expansive substances, revitalize it in its most physical and sinewy aspect, beef it up with bizarre and anarchic samples, drug it in the bpm on Q-base, overdo it with the most kicking and musically incorrect bass lines available on the market.

Already the opening track Rendez-vu, at close inspection, flaunts an unbridled vitality very Pasolini-like, blue hooligan, the vocodered voices make it more of a pantalonnade Residents on Andalusian vacation, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas version. The “chemical” treatment is so evident in muscular and super energetic tracks like Yo-Yo and Jump’n’shout, as they are filled with clamors, squeaks, gurgles, whirlwinds, screeches and screams like they were whirling electronic pinwheels. Particularly in Jump and Shout, one notices the joyful and streetwise verve that devastates the raggage script the track stands on.
The enthusiasm and excitement these two tracks convey make us relive the mocking carnival-like atmosphere felt during their night at the Junction in Brixton, the violent south of London, where illegality reigned supreme.

Ah, the Junction… even the hyper-violent cops in a J. Ellroy kind of way would have gladly stayed away, not a shadow of regular taxi drivers in sight, the only sirens heard were those non-stop from the pirate-stations pumping merciless drum and bass and speed garage in the harsh London night; the only sensible choice was to reach the Junction, in that Brixton heart of darkness, with cautious mulatto-skinned drivers and hope not to run into a muy peligra metro gang of Creole Bubbas.
Once the entrance to the Junction was gained, the disco-pub stood out for its desolate and malheureuse suburban aesthetics. Here, Basement Jaxx performed the miracle of giving house back its original transgressive force and its primitive purity, as was done in the good old days at the Warehouse in Chicago.
Yes, at the Brixton Junction, house became frightening again. The squeaks and bleeps whirled saturatingly in the air, the 808s strafed, the 303 basslines screamed madly, phonetic distortions pirouetted in the dome's spirals… the mind flew not to Cocoricò but to the blues-boat parties of Aphex Twin and the sound drifts of Rephlex, the most irreducible and eccentric of English techno-labels.

At the Junction, Basement Jaxx were the conductors of a gang of irregular circenses, dissolute devoted to the creed of the telluric explosions of London beats and the tectonic erosions of the sound layers, who continuously tried to escape their bodies in a spiritual vision of music lived as gay science, to enliven the dreariness of their daily life.

Basement Jaxx's house is indeed a caress but of sandpaper. Even in the hit U can’t stop me, resident voices, bruised and distorted basses, bewildered breakbeats do not caress the seductive soul voice of Yvonne John Lewis; in Red Alert the vitaminic super-funk is too over the top to be consumed by the housewife from Voghera. Too energetic, too shattering, too lascivious to be a summer hit, Red Alert, stands out as a milestone of the naughtiest and most mocking chemical house.
Other single episodes stand out for the eruptions of rough and angular sounds as in the funk-hip hop of Same old show that seems to be performed by Public Image in alcoholic symbiosis with their camarades prophetiques Bollock Brothers. Another drunken techno-pagan party milonga is Bingo Bango where the crackling house-ska tempo proves functional to other boutiques big beat sets like those of Bentley Rhythm Ace or Fat Boy Slim (who is a fervent admirer of cellar jazz).
In fact, it was not unusual to see the lunette disks of the duo of disco-punks moonlighting in other dj-boxes like those of the adrenalinic gang Wall of Sound or Skint due to the desperate vitality that oozes in every groove of “Remedy”.

Contrarily, the ballad Stop 4 Love turns out to be melancholic and poignant during the masquerade, just to amaze the astonished audience with their electronic clownery with a dramatic number. “See – they seem to say – we can do this too” and down with violins, harmonicas and pianos in a full-blown melodious flutter, all velvet, lace and coquetries.
Then, not content, they reel off, with pyrotechnic games, a grand finale effect and hit with their best punch, the left one, dismantling everything with the booming final theme Don’t give up where the rascal synths slide and neigh, then fade leaving a soulful feminine voice to ripple, then remount more virulently and cancerously than before. A total devastation.

Then from nowhere, to not seem too bad, the closure of the circus carousel is entrusted to a soft-soul calembour, soft and sugary, sickly sweet.
The doubt quickly arises: geniuses or thrice over shrewd? Probably both.