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90If you're wondering what electronic music is missing, look no further: Scars should serve as a reminder (if you needed one) that Basement Jaxx are an essential piece of the puzzle.
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85An entire album as powerful and immediate as Scars sounds enticing in theory, but Basement Jaxx knows better than turning a single, creative sound into a stale, contrite formula, especially when an unprecedented amount of talent is at their beck and call.
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80Scars is the strongest Basement Jaxx album since 2001's "Rooty".
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80There's a breathtaking array of bleeps, quirks, bits and bobs popping up to keep the boogie busy and the mind attentive.
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By closing the song with unadorned strings, Basement Jaxx seems to be finding feeling in its new efficiency.
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While a Basement Jaxx album used to feel like a below-the-radar party for real heads, Scars could easily soundtrack a celebrity bash. That's not the Jaxx's fault, of course, though capitulation suits them.
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72This is evidence of true artistic growth, but these successes share space on Scars with creative cul-de-sacs and uninspired genre exercise.
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If Basement Jaxx want to hide their scars behind such easily enjoyable and well constructed pop music, then long may they continue.
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Scars is a worthwhile throwback to the freak attitude that kicked off their career over a decade earlier.
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70They've come pretty darn close before, and they may very well do so in the future, but with Scars, the Jaxx have gotten too caught up in trying top themselves.
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60Kelis' involvement in the brooding title track can't save it from its fundamental dullness, warped, tetchy ska of 'Saga' fails to get under your skin, They're better on the camp, ecstatic single 'Raindrops,' and the hollering soul jive of 'She's No good.' [Oct 2009, p.98]
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60Basement Jaxx still manage to exceed expectations with each album. [Oct 2009, p.91]
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60Simon Ratcliffe and Felix Buxton have retrenched, recruited a slew of vocalists and made the sort of uptempo record they were doing at the turn of the century. [Oct 2009, p.107]
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This is their best album in years, but there's no real progression here. Ono's mindfuck of a performance is proof: when a band needs to include such bizarreness as their record's experimental centerpiece, perhaps they are working a little too hard to prove their expressive worth.
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Although still flying the party flag, their hectic mash-up of house, disco and hedonism is no longer quite so thrilling, even with help from Santigold.
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60Return To Form from last electro band standing.
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Scars is a peculiarly irritating sort of failure. It's an overachieving, overqualified failure.
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40The Brixton duo's music fails to connect with any of the collaborating vocalists, to the point where you wonder if those involved were even in the same room together.
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The fragments don't fit together, and one ends up dreading the next mistep. [Fall 2009, p.74]
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