Bingo, bingo, be-be-bing-bing, bango

Continuing my trip back through the 1999 album charts.

16/05/99 : Remedy - Basement Jaxx

I owned this (14/33) but rarely listened to it and even more rarely all the way through - I seem to recall there are some nice sounds on it, but it's a bit repetitive.

Well, "Rendez-vu" is a fine opener and "Red Alert" and "Bingo Bango" also jump out as strong tracks.  I also liked "Don't Give Up" for some late album weirdness - it was nicely different from the rest.  All the rest of it wasn't bad but, yeah,  a whole album of it was a bit too much for me I'm afraid - in my (very) old clubbing days, one track would have been well received, two would have resulted in a move towards the bar and any more than that would have been just too much.

We're at #4 with a new entry this week at the beginning of a 26 week run, which feels slightly generous and then it managed another 30 weeks across another three runs, which feels very generous indeed - it basically spent 15 months on the chart, with a couple of months off for no obvious reason.  The rest of the top five were Texas (another new entry), ABBA,  Stereophonics and Fatboy Slim and we have one more new entry in the top ten with The Phantom Menace OST (#10 - ahhh, can you remember the level of expectation for that?  And then Jar-Jar happened...).

Wikipedia tells me that Basement Jaxx were unhappy with the state of dance music and decided this album would be their "remedy" - which seems somewhat arrogant, but I guess they did OK out of it.  The critics mostly loved it but the less positive comments ring true to me with The A.V. Club saying it was "nowhere near as revolutionary as the hype would insinuate" and our old mate Robert Christgau remarked "like so much good house, more fun than reading the newspaper and less fun than advertised", which may just be him being clever but it does ring true to me. Apart from here, it mostly made the lower reaches of the chart in various European countries, except in Norway where it made #2.

"Customers also listened to" Opus III, Dave Spoon, The Bucketheads and Reality - errr, OK.  As for Basement Jaxx, I like some of the sounds on here and I like the general idea, but the album as a whole just doesn't quite work for me, I'm afraid.

09/05/99 - Doesn't gel for me
23/05/99 - All a bit odd

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