Atlantic Jaxx

We Say...

Review by Michaelangelo Matos

Back in the mid-’90s, house music was chugging along just fine — which, given the then-constant ruptures and mutations of its fellows in the electronic dance continuum, meant that it was stagnating. What house had been to the London clubland — rough-and-ready, nerves exposed, made on the cheap and all the more urgent for it — Basement Jaxx would become for house. Not alone: folks like Armand Van Helden and Green Velvet, DJ Sneak and Gene Farris, flew the genre’s freak flag proudly. But the Jaxx — South Londoners Simon Ratcliffe and Felix Buxton — were ingenious in that their “punk house” (the duo’s term) was less about stripping things down to the gears and digging on its nuances than making walls of sound that skittered suddenly just as you’d started to be lulled by the groove.

None of this would mean anything if the grooves themselves didn’t rip, and Atlantic Jaxx Recordings is testament that the pair had their priorities in order from the start. Even with four great full albums behind them, it’s hard to think of a Jaxx track so head-stompingly immediate as “Set Yo Body Free,” from 1997, a cavernous robo-stomp whose vocodered title phrase, spooky keyboards and echoed effects make it an example of how good Buxton and Ratcliffe’s output might be even if they’d decided to be house purists. The heavily Brazilian-flavored “Belo Horizonti” and “Samba Magic” are two of the most buoyant records of the ’90s, and among the most convincing Latinate tracks ever made by a couple of white Englishmen. Oddly, given their albums’ high strike rate with vocalists, the diva cuts here, like Corinna Joseph’s “Lonely” and “Live Your Life with Me,” don’t stick. But they make up for it with “Fly Life,” from 1997, whose blipping rave synths and heaving beat would have made Buxton and Ratcliffe DJ-music legends even if they’d never recorded a real album.