Basement Jaxx

Kish Kash

(Astralwerks)

London’s Simon Ratcliffe and Felix Buxton are house music’s biggest sellouts. The pair have so relentlessly contaminated house’s righteous four on the floor thump that Jaxx tracks readily tear apart dance floors of any persuasion other than indie. On Kish Kash, they finally complete their music’s dissolution into the poptastic.

Where Rooty glanced towards a range of possibilities, here the duo’s direction is clear—they’re set on overloading your sensory circuits, replacing sex with static, skank with slam. The music is so disfigured it’s unrecognizable as house, or anything traditional at that. “Cish Cash” is essentially post-millennial punk and opener “Good Luck” slaps a bona fide diva over drum and bass, but even she’s barely able to restrain the music’s machismo.

Actually, the whole album is persistently unstable. It’s ironic that the wailing “Lucky Star,” featuring London mic adder Dizzee Rascal, is the most reservedly chaotic track on Kish Kash. Elsewhere, the music wants to collapse in exhaustion. Buried in swirls of noise and guitar, the otherwise steady beat on “Supersonic” seems to teeter before its own breakdown. “Right Here’s the Spot” nearly limps under the weight of its sheer sonic detail and insistent low-end.

With a few exceptions later into the album (sounding more like the Jaxx of old), these tracks are so treacherous that you’ve got to either dive into the vortex or leave. Even the beats almost don’t matter as much as the immaculate racket, which actualizes rave music’s coveted state of “mental” while rendering the listener totally helpless. It’s an instant delirium machine; as J.C. Chasez coldly implores, “plug it in, baby.” —Ryan J. Kuo

Coral Fang

The Distillers

(Hellcat)

Hard core punk is like a pet rotweiller: it’s cool, no one wants to mess with you, shouldn’t let young children near it.

Despite a lot of similarities, crossbreeding it with pop is risky: the rottweiler is as likely to eat the fluffy little poodle as to share genetic material. Even then, the hybrid is usually brainless and sterile: see Blink-182.

Luckily, The Distillers are sufficiently supple and catchy enough to make it work. Lead singer Brody Dalle’s voice is a wonder, flitting from brooding gravelly tones to chainsaw howls in the blinking of an eye, as on the semi-acoustic “The Hunger”.

While most of her male rivals chug out their vocal lines in plodding pedestrian style, Dalle weaves her lyrics into songs. Her ragged-and-torn voice has a subtlety of phrasing and pitch traditionally eschewed in punk if favor of blunt assault.

The songs themselves are unremittingly grim in subject matter. Dalle just separated from her husband Tim Armstrong, lead singer of Rancid, and the lyrics (and blood-and-razor soaked album art) are full of pain.

But the music never entirely succumbs to this gloom, with bright shiny guitar lines and evilly catchy choruses. This is pop music with growl and bite.

On “Die On A Rope”, the male members of the band sing “Way-Oh, way-oh” over a classic three chord riff, while Brody sings, “I wish you didn’t love me no more.”

This isn’t angst, it’s revenge, all the sweeter because it sounds so irresistible. —Andrew R. Iliff