Baby Fox has always been something of a strange fit at Roadrunner Records, whose roster consists primarily of hardcore and speedpunk acts. Baby Fox, on the other hand, comes from an explicitly downtempo place; their sound is a sort of reggaefied, dubwise trip-hop thing. On
A Normal Family they keep things dark and slow, but always strangely pretty and never boring. The samples tend to come from unusual places, like radio advertisements and field recordings, and song titles like "Our Face Is Not a Jackal" and "Black Twister" betray something of a gloomy mindset. But they manage to deliver a highly respectable rendition of the
Junior Byles classic "Curlylocks," as well as a number of strangely beautiful and densely textured originals, among them the dreamy "Ladybird" (with its parlor piano and sampled insect voices) and "Za Za," which features an almost tango-ish stop-start rhythm that segues into a gentle house thump with dubwise vocals. Very nice. ~ Rick Anderson