Honestly I don’t feel very strongly about Basement Jaxx in either direction. But lately I’ve been listening to “Where’s Your Head At” a bunch. It’s a very good song, mostly thanks to the firepower of its fully armed and operational Gary Numan sample. But it’s as though they were unsatisfied with merely centering their song around one of the most monstrous synth lines ever constructed and felt compelled to add a bunch of unnecessary junk to it, like some kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder. The single edit in the video above is better than the full-length version in this regard, but it still gets a little too goofy with the funny voices. And the full-length version has about 45 unnecessary seconds in the middle and another 45 unnecessary seconds at the end. It’s not like I’ve listened to a ton of Basement Jaxx, but pretty much everything I’ve heard is like this in some way–just too busy. I understand that this is considered “maximalism,” but for me it’s clutter, or mania, or trying too hard, or something else unappealing, and when you’ve divorced it from a colossal Numanism it’s not something I’m interested in hearing at all.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 at 2:51 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.