Basement Jaxx: sleazy, sneaky, joyless, marvelous

Basement Jaxx are shrill. Basement Jaxx are merciless when it comes to cobbling hooks, rhythm tracks you think you remember from old house or Italo-disco records, and diva vocal melodies. Basement Jaxx albums remind me of casual gay sex observed from a comfortable distance by liberal het chroniclers: you're at the bar, you hear music in flashes, you don't remember the conversation, and suddenly you're back at his place and THUMP THUMP THUMP; it's fun and not very enjoyable.

These objections still hold for Crazy Itch Radio. But it's also the record of theirs I've enjoyed the most -- the one which, two days later, doesn't pain me to recollect in tranquility. Their version of dance music still doesn't offer the promise of transcendence that their referents did without strain; their elusively allusive approach evinces a certain quaint European post-modernism that doesn't fudge the line between distance and submission as often as we'd like. Post-modernists need concepts, though. The key is in the title: truth in advertising if anything is. An imaginary station on which you can hear tracks evoking/inspired by Vanity 6, Robyn, Cee-Lo, and Dizzee Rascal duke it out, Crazy Itch Radio realizes BJaxx's pursuit of sleazy pleasure. Credit the album's near-flawless sequencing. Applaud their writing/assembling sleazy pleasures like "Hush Boy," "Take Me Back To Your House," and "U R On My Mind," the latter of which summons the ancient weirdness of a DJ Shadow track (Greil Marcus might approve).