Basement Jaxx's Rooty Is Too Heady to Get Down To

With the release of their first album, 1999's Remedy, Basement Jaxx hailed a return to the unfettered, balls-out dancefloor experience of the last days of disco and the first days of house. Remedy also distinguished itself from orthodox dance music, flashing such divergent styles as flamenco guitar licks, the odd salsa loop, old school robotics, even ragga. Damn, that record was hot.

So what's the followup to the disc that was, for all intents and purposes, the soundtrack to the end of the millennium? These guys are smart?of course they're not going to try to do the same thing twice. By their own admission, they're over house music anyway. "Even though that inspired us when we started, we're not that excited by house music anymore?we just want to do music, futuristic music, and we use computers and samples to make these things happen? We just want to make good music that excites us," Simon Ratcliffe told the L.A. Times last year. That's all fine and good, but what about the fans? What about those of us who are starved for some decent rump-shaking? No, we're not partying like it's 1999 anymore, and it's silly to expect a repeat performance, but my hopes have been high.

Listening to their second album, Rooty, named after the parties Basement Jaxx have been throwing in their native South London, I can't say my hopes have been dashed, exactly, because it's a great album. Really out there at times, resonating with the typical sample-crazed surrealism we've come to expect from Basement Jaxx?the mariachi-driven "Broken Dreams" could be the accompaniment to a Mexican shotgun wedding, while "Crazy Girl" sounds like it was cut in a Japanese Kino parlor. Rooty is just so clever in that lovely English way that has me straining my consciousness to get all its quotes and allusions, challenging at every turn my sense of how cool and savvy I am. But for all its crafty manipulation of hooks and samples, it's not Remedy.

Rooty's not going to be my personal soundtrack for the summer of 2001. There are some dope tracks here, but not much for the dancefloor. There's the catchy "Romeo" featuring the vocals of UK rookie-diva Kele Le Roc, definitely getting the head bobbing. "Just One Kiss" is an evolved hats-off to 80s flyaway party music that El DeBarge might have come up with in some alternate universe, and I really do dig the shouty, garage-esque "Where's Your Head At." Where the record fails, perhaps, is not so much in its not being designed for dancing, but in its refusal to take itself seriously. Remedy was playful, lighthearted and hedonistic; Rooty is largely a parody of those qualities. Still, Basement Jaxx really are brilliant, but maybe that's the problem with Rooty?it's so heady that you just can't get down to it.