Sign In:

27 users online Sign Up! (forgotten password?)

Basement Jaxx

clloyd by Christopher Lloyd [Edit this content] ▾ 0 comments 01:42 December 7th, 2003
Edit this event
5034
Date: 05/12/2003

Attendees


Add your name

When it comes to dance bands playing live, you can usually expect a few flashy visuals and a couple of blokes behind banks of machinery. Not Basement Jaxx. The Jaxx like to put on a show. It’s well documented that their live sets are like miniature carnivals; a kaleidoscope of colour and sound. The problem is that new album 'Kish Kash' isn’t an album that conjures up fun images. It’s a rather bland album and the colour that springs to mind is decidedly grey. So it’s good to report that rather than rely solely on past glories, they base the set heavily on 'Kish Kash', give it the energy it lacked on record, AND take a new approach to their live shows. Where once there were Salsa queens and Voodoo dancing queens filling the stage with colour, there is now a giant screen literally blasting the entire building with an array of colourful yet manic bombast that perfectly fit re-energised tracks such as opener and new single 'Good Luck', as well as other album highlights 'Plug it In'_ and 'Cish Cash'.

Old material is not forgotten, either. Early on in the set, 'Red Alert' is belted out with enough ferocity to ensure pogo action so hard that it threatens to smash the floor from beneath us. 'Romeo' is mixed in with the bassline from The Clash’s 'Magnificent Seven', seeing the Jaxx’s Simon Ratcliffe become something of a guitar hero, giving it some serious guitar fretwork front of stage. The Jaxx/Clash crossover isn’t the only mash-up of the night, though. Halfway through the set, the screen darkens, the guest vocalists disappear, and we get a bit of what feels like a club DJ set, kicking off with a collision between some serious bone crunching beats, 50 Cent and the bassline from The White Stripe’s 'Seven Nation Army' and ending up with some serious deep house action.

The set just HAD to end with 'Where’s Your Head At'. If 'Red Alert' threatened to collapse the floor, then live, 'Where’s Your Head At' threatened to flatten the entire city, rendering the city council’s attempts to rejuvenate Birmingham futile.

I admit, I like Basement Jaxx a lot, but I just couldn’t get into 'Kish Kash', but seeing them rip up Birmingham like this, I’m convinced their best work is still yet to come.

  • Basement Jaxx 8 / 10
Basement Jaxx
From the archive

Add your comment

Reply


 or Abandon