Jamiroquai - Automaton

The Guardian 80

(Virgin EMI)

Jamiroquai’s eighth album straddles two traditional scenarios: a dystopian, digital future and booze-soaked sunny days spent spying on sophisticated ladies. Set to the sounds of French touch, disco funk, Tron movie scores and Bond-style strings, there are agitated prophecies – such as on synth onslaught Automaton – and libidinous love songs: he worships at the feet of a cosmopolitan female on Summer Girl, while Hot Property is about a woman whose mind is so sharp that “she just killed a man”.

While his energies might have waned (his voice on the chemically addled Dr Buzz is particularly fried), the spooky groove of We Can Do It and the chintzy jazz-lite of Vitamin revive the classic traits of his early career. Despite some naff phrases, dodgy song titles and a lot of robotic trickery, during times of grim austerity, the return of Jay Kay’s elite, escapist lifestyle – full of fast cars, fast girls and big bulldozing basslines – offers a flash of ostentatious fun.

Pitchfork 70

It’s been two decades since the British group Jamiroquai treadmilled into ubiquity. The British band—a rotating cast of characters with flamboyant frontman Jay Kay as their falsetto-scraping nucleus—reached peak cool with the acid jazz snap of “Virtual Insanity,” a hit from 1997’s Travelling Without Moving that marked the too-early crest of a band shedding the acoustic guitar-plucked pop of years prior. Though regarded as their most notable catalog notch, it never took off in the States beyond the canonical music video, winning the coveted MTV Video Music Award for Video of the Year in 1997 but failing to chart on the Billboard Hot 100.

It seemed like Jay Kay’s endless carousel of fuzzy hats was more of a talking point than the tightening song structures of the albums and singles that followed, from the clever interplay between string section and chorus on “Canned Heat” to the sizzle of disco ball fervor on “Starchild.” The subsequent projects didn’t change the formula of “Virtual Insanity” so much as continued to define it. A Funk Odyssey, which arrived in 2001, spiraled into tie-dye experimentalism, 2005’s Dynamite reeled it back to Studio 54 soundtracking, and five years later, Rock Dust Light Star edged into a contemporary feel. Finally, their sound was upgraded from the demo sketch haze of the 1993 debut Emergency on Planet Earth to something far more muscular and refined.

In the seven years since Rock Dust Light Star, preying on a public hunger for nostalgia has been a hallmark for chart-scaling ’90s fixtures like Pharrell Williams and Daft Punk, the latter of whom turned to Chic’s Nile Rodgers for authentic bulletproofing on 2013’s “Get Lucky” and its parent album Random Access Memories. Automaton, Jamiroquai’s eighth studio album, fills a similar gap, but comes to it far more naturally. It’s the highest rung on their ladder, nodding to the signposts of their former style without forgetting them, fuzzy hats and all.

At their best, Jamiroquai extend the thread of their discography to its next potential platform, with a sheen that emphasizes the co-production from Jay Kay and keyboardist Matt Johnson. On single “Cloud 9,” Jay Kay deals out romantic chest thumps over instrumentation that feels alive, from the electric guitars and string hits to the handclaps and vein-popping bass lines. “Something About You” is starry-eyed and mouth-puckering sour, while the urgent “Carla” invites a tired Stevie Wonder comparison that, for once in the band’s history, actually fits.

When they veer into uncharted waters, they tend to muddle the all the previously laid groundwork. The title track bobs and weaves with a vocal melody that doesn’t slot into place until its star-gazing hook, several moments too late. The space funk of “Dr. Buzz” offers political commentary on the laughable state of affairs in North America. Jamiroquai has always been at their best when they lean into the kitsch, even when they want to be taken seriously. Here, it comes across like a moment of unearned gratuitousness.

Beyond that, Automaton may somewhat feel like a return to form (it hit No. 1 on iTunes in 38 countries), but it’s the sum total of a veteran group so agile at their own self-constructed subgenre that it’s easy to miss how far they’ve come. The album is a testament of their talent: No band from the ’90s has stayed so true to its sound while modifying it in real time, yielding some of its best work more than 20 years after its inception. They’re still figuring it out, but somehow, even their mistakes feel fresh.

The Guardian 60

(Virgin EMI)
Clever, clubbable pop makes for an audacious but strangely listenable comeback

Imitation, we’re told, is the sincerest form of flattery. What are we to make, then, of the surprise return of British acid funkateers Jamiroquai as a Daft Punk tribute act? Band leader Jay Kay, once known for his statement hats, now sports a glowing robot Pokémon headdress in the video for comeback single Automaton, an appealing, synth-driven disco burbler. You might counter that Jamiroquai planted a flag in space long ago, with songs such as Cosmic Girl and Space Cowboy. But on this eighth Jamiroquai album, parallels with the shiny French duo go beyond a penchant for android cool.

Vintage synths squelch throughout; swirls of disco strings dance up suggestively against Vocoders (Superfresh) or Giorgio Moroder basslines (Shake It On). The more organic aspects of Jamiroquai’s career funk have been superseded by the neon glow of electronics. Had a cut like Dr Buzz been included on Daft Punk’s 2013 Random Access Memories, few would have cried foul. Fast-forward to 2017, and Daft Punk’s continued ubiquity (in cahoots with the Weeknd) means the French duo’s chrome-plated thumbprints remain all over this sound. Automaton seems an audacious comeback, to say the least, but also strangely listenable.

Pop is a giant feedback loop in which Stevie Wonder and Curtis Mayfield begat Jamiroquai and Pharrell