Cozza Frenzy

Album Review

Following electronic dance music can easily lead to a sort of jaundiced lassitude. The more of it you listen to, the more every groove sounds like just another peg stuck into a well-established hole: a thumping house beat here, a jittery jungle breakbeat there, a chilly techno track over there. Although genres and subgenres splinter and proliferate with bewildering constancy, there's very little in the electro neighborhood that has sounded genuinely new or innovative in years. Except for the work of Bassnectar, a Bay Area DJ who takes all of these musical elements (and more), and folds, spindles, and manipulates them into something that is genuinely new and personal, and unbelievably fun. Like Fatboy Slim, he is immediately identifiable by the general flavor rather than by the specific style of his work; also like Fatboy Slim, much of his music seems to be animated by joy rather than by resentment, greed, or ego. The individual elements of his style are relatively easy to identify. In a Bassnectar mix you're liable to hear at least one (and sometimes several) of the following: a sudden lurch from duple to triple meter; a sudden drop into half-time; multiple layers of synthesized glockenspiels playing heartbreakingly lovely arpeggios; rappers and singers pitch-shifted beyond all recognition; spoken word samples that appear for no apparent reason, but whose rhythmic character is suddenly revealed by their incorporation into a blissfully funky groove. On Cozza Frenzy, you'll hear elements of dubstep, hip-hop, techno, house, and electro-pop, but none of it ends up sounding like anything other than Bassnectar. As on his previous two albums, highlights are almost impossible to identify — however, the brilliant remix of Fever Ray's "When I Grow Up" is especially thrilling, and in some ways unusually nuanced, and "The Churn of the Century" is more varied in tone and texture than usual, even by Bassnectars very high standards. Mesmerizing the Ultra is still the best introduction to the man and his style, but Cozza Frenzy is essential as well.