Jamiroquai Tried to Move Forward On Their Comeback Album—But They Got Lost Along the Way

FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Music

Jamiroquai Tried to Move Forward On Their Comeback Album—But They Got Lost Along the Way

On the famed English funk and acid jazz band’s long awaited 'Automaton,' we learn that not every giant leap lands on firm ground.

Jamiroquai have been thinking a lot about the future lately. They've had some time to at least. It's been seven relatively quiet years since their last album Rock Dust Light Star and it's finally time to take a step into the great unknown, at least to hear the band tell it. In a recent video interview posted to their Facebook page, eccentric frontman Jay Kay chatted about new music from the interstellar group. After a few albums of indulging in retro-gazing funk, it was apparently time for an update. Their new album—given the appropriately cutting-edge title Automaton—is apparently designed to strike a balance between more contemporary electronic music and the live element of the band. "It sounds like us, but it's moved forward," he said.

Advertisement

Reinvention has always been at the core of Jamiroquai's music. Appearing in 90s London, Jamiroquai blew the lid off the city's burgeoning acid jazz scene with their now classic debut album Emergency On Planet Earth. Mixing up Jay Kay's wonky yet soulful vocals with instrumentation ranging from didgeridoos to silky synthesizers and a healthy offering of horns, the success of that album led to an eight-album deal with Sony. After their first monumental record came their first major label album, The Return of the Space Cowboy, and subsequent hazy hit with a similar name, "Space Cowboy."

Some might say that the rest is history—the band went on to be one of the most successful charting groups to ever come out of the UK, with 26 UK Top 40s alone and a sprawling legion of obsessive (sometimes far too much so) fans. The group solidified their iconic sound in the years to come through more beloved hits like the high energy love song "Cosmic Girl" and the ubiquitous peak MTV-era "Virtual Insanity." While a lot of these songs have similar parts, each one felt a bit different—each another slightly different shade in Jamiroquai's hallucinatory rainbow.

In the records to come, the group continued to experiment with an outlandish visual identity—gravity defying music videos and enough people on stage to qualify as a small township—and songs that shattered the glass between cheery pop music and the type of psychedelic disco that crate-digging DJs like Moodymann are still dropping at warehouse parties in Brooklyn. On Rock Dust Light Star, their sound continued to mutate towards areas of more plasticine funk and breezy disco. But they've mostly laid low since then, quietly teasing news about a new album and a world tour, which has fans champing at the bit for whatever "moving forward" meant this time for the band. Anticipation was so hefty for their return that their first announced gig at London's Roundhouse venue sold out in 60 seconds. While early reviews of their first comeback gigs seem positive, the record seems to represent more of a sidestep than a foot forward.

Advertisement

Through 12 tracks, Jay Kay and his current six-piece lineup—composed of keyboardist Matthew Johnson, bassist Paul Turner, guitarist Rob Harris, drummer Derrick McKenzie, and percussionist Sola Akingbola—reach for the same type of addictive hooks and instrumentation that even critics of their post-acid-jazz driven work couldn't help but fall in love with. But their revival this time has mostly meant streamlining. On the band's best tracks—like 2005's "Seven Days in Sunny June"—Kay and co. felt like magicians. Like an infinity pool of sensuality, it was hard to tell where one verse ended and another chorus began. But on Automaton, their approach to structure is more scientific. Tracks like "Cloud 9" have the same seabreezy feeling and near-parasitic hooks, but you can see the seams between the wispy instrumentation and Kay's smooth croons. It has this stilted feeling as if they broke down their best hits to their component parts and rebuilt them from scratch—only to end up with a few leftover screws at the end.

Other tracks feel similarly overthought. The jarring vocoder and clangy synth sounds on "Automaton" feel more like a stiff mattress instead of the soft, inviting waterbed of their older tunes. "Dr Buzz" features wordplay that look to the perilous state of the world ("Annie go get your gun, the west is getting so wild"), a noble entry in band's repertoire of socially engaged pop songs. But even that relative high point is derailed by a calculatedly "odd" vocal bridge at the track's halfway point. Jamiroquai usually have a knack for these sorts of frenzied moments—flurries of confetti-like instrumentation and sporadic vocal pitch changes. But something about the way they use even that tactic on "Dr. Buzz" feels awkward.

Some comebacks can feel like an artist grasping at the last straws of their relevance, youth, cash, or perhaps all three. In the case of Jamiroquai's reemergence into our lives, it doesn't feel like they were reaching at all—they just wanted to spruce up their decades-old sound a bit. The question is, did they need to? People very much still know Jamiroquai's name, style, DJ his hits at the world's best underground parties, and it's safe to say he probably has enough money to buy a roundtrip ticket on one of Elon Musk's spaceships. I believe that Jay and his group genuinely wanted to give their fans—young and old—a new piece of music to love and hold and catalyze their long-awaited reemergence into the live space. Automaton ends up serving as a reminder that, even for would-be astronauts, not every giant leap lands on firm ground.