Basement Jaxx Talk about Their New Album
Basement Jaxx have officially been making sweet, monstrous, manic music together since 1994.
While Basement Jaxx seemed to make slight house music headway in North America with their major label debut, 1999’s Remedy, the duo have since struggled to keep their heads above water this side of the ocean ever since.
Despite Scars, their new albu,m being an astounding audio assault, things remain stagnant for Simon Ratcliffe and Felix Buxton of Basement Jaxx in terms of chart success on this continent 10 years after Remedy. But personally and professionally, these two Brits have grown into something larger than any SoundScan report.
“We can ask Yoko Ono to do records with us now,” said Simon Ratcliffe about how much the duo have evolved since their inception.
“The live show has really come on, back in the day we weren’t sure if we should even go live. Our contemporaries Daft Punk and Chemical Brothers were all doing live shows, but our music seemed to have more people in it. It couldn’t just be two people behind the mixing decks. We thought we had to present what was on the record, which was really dense and populated and over time I guess we’ve become more confident and more ambitious.”
While that ruthlessness doesn’t seem to hurt the Jaxx in the U.K., where they still chart regularly, outside the clubs they’ve mostly disappeared from most North American’s consciousness. Could it be that they’re too ambitious? With the shape of today’s pop music landscape, can Canadian and American brains even handle big bodacious beats, glittering synths and Sam Sparrow’s soulful voice (hear “Feelings Gone”)?
“With us it’s quite hard to work out what we are,” Ratcliffe says from a couch in his Toronto hotel room. “It’s like with our first album, a couple German journalists were absolutely baffled because there was humour on it and they asked, ‘Is this album a joke?’ And then other people find it weird that we would do a song with JC Chasez of ‘N Sync. What it is is that we’re not purists.
