Of course, you don’t turn to the Bad Boy Chiller Crew to learn about love. The boys work best when they bludgeon a sample: They take a shimmery vocal and pound any melodrama out of it, thwacking bass drops, grunts, sirens, and bleats over lilting lines about love and fame. Influential lingers way too long on other voices: “Why Did You Play Me” spends 45 seconds with Kyla, of “One Dance” fame, before the Bad Boy Chiller Crew barrels in. “Say Goodbye” begins with a wispy female vocalist pledging eternal devotion for nearly a minute, until the B.B.C.C. steamrolls through, chanting about drinks on tap. They edge dangerously close to sounding like Cascada.
Compared to the fricative pulses of a song like “Bounce to This One,” or the coked-out wallop of “Sliding,” the love songs here are chintzy sugar rushes. The less sense they make, the better they sound. Why are they frantically rapping about how badly they want to go into space? What’s with the squiggle of bagpipes in “Jurgen Kropper,” one of two throbbing tracks named after football players? They remix a 2007 rave anthem from DJ Q, a stalwart of the sped-up cousin of UK garage known as bassline, into a song that sounds like the “Cha Cha Slide” on poppers. Bad Boy Chiller Crew dazzles and delights in absurdity.
That’s not to say they can’t also make you feel something. “Memory” is the most successful song here at smuggling in an actual emotion, likely because the boys sing it themselves. “I want to be there with you, but I can’t trust nobody,” they murmur, before the beat hiccups and accelerates. No matter how hard they try to make themselves palatable to the masses, they’re still most comfortable in chaos.
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