Chemical Brothers - Rave culture, chart-friendly

In the beginning there was dust

The destinies of Ed Simons and Tom Rowlands cross paths in the history faculty halls of the University of Manchester. It's the late Eighties, and the two lads from the outskirts of London, armed with an insatiable curiosity for all things musical, decide right away to mix their passions together, hopelessly in love as they are with groove, in the strictest sense of the word, with transatlantic hip-hop, 2 tone ska, Teutonic electronics and even a bit of shoegaze. In short, two kids with sharp taste, irresistibly drawn to rhythm and every possible transfiguration of it.

And so, after a whole series of experiments, tinkering of every sort and stylistic refinements, the future chemists make their debut in London's coolest venues in the early Nineties, a scene dominated by drum'n'bass, cyber-techno and other surrogates of entertainment-grade electronics. The pioneers of big beat gradually begin to develop their formula, remixing pretty much everything, from Eric B. & Rakim to My Bloody Valantine. These are the years of the Madchester sound, and before long Simons and Rowlands will also be called upon across the Atlantic, opening for sacred monsters like Orbital and Underworld, going simply by the name Dust Brothers. It's precisely those early dj sets at electronic festivals around the world that forcefully grab the attention of industry insiders. The blend of techno, punk, acid house, electro-rock and ethnic flourishes the two put forward sparks real interest, and the Dust brothers' fame grows within just a few months.

It's 1995, and Tom and Ed suddenly have to shelve the idea of calling themselves Dust Brothers, since sharing the name with the original duo had from the very start drawn heavy complaints and legal threats. In the same period, the whole world finally comes into contact with what will become one of the most exciting and influential electronic formulas of the Nineties, and beyond.

It's the year of Exit Planet Dust, the chemists' debut album, released on Freestyle Dust/Junior Boy's Own. A debut that bursts straight into ninth place on the UK charts, and features collaborations with talents of the calibre of Beth Orton, simply perfect in interpreting the pachydermic pulses of "Alive Alone", a track wisely placed at the close of the album and tuned in full harmony with the Bristol sound.

But the escape from planet Dust and from the Madchester of their university years takes shape in the cyber-groove of the opener "Leave Home", set off by John Jennings' filthy bassline, backing the beat that would go on to become the undisputed symbol of the Chemical brand. The album is a freak wave of stripped-down hip-hop tangles ("In Dust We Trust"), amphetamine-fuelled digressions into rave appeal, often fitted with punishing stop&go breaks, as esoteric as they are the offspring of a certain industrial-punk-dance sound that was decidedly in vogue in London's suburbs at the time ("Three Little Birdies Down Beats", "Song To The Siren" and "Fuck Up Beats"). A statement of intent from the chemists, capable of shaking up and taking over the dancefloors of the old continent.

The relentless android siren of "Chemical Beats" and the smooth chilly transfiguration of "Chico's Groove", placed right in the thick of things, fully sum up the idea of the "sound" that had been parked in Ed Simons' mind for years. Tim Burgess (The Charlatans) lends his vocals to the breakthrough single "Life Is Sweet", and it's an instant gold record.

It's the prelude to the interplanetary success of the years to come.

1997 sees the release of Dig Your Own Hole, the English duo's second album. We're in the eye of the storm of the electronic revolution, of big beat and of Nineties rave culture. The pitch-black cover with a girl's profile is one of the most iconic in the history of dance music, the equivalent of an "Abbey Road" or a "Sticky Fingers". Except here we're in acidic, violent, danceable territory.

The guitar riff that opens "Block Rockin' Beats", still the Chemical Brothers' manifesto track to this day, sends your pulse racing before the raw, energetic ride that brands the track for good. The title track actually picks up the pace further, with a suburban, nocturnal, claustrophobic breakbeat very close to Prodigy ("The Fat Of The Land" came out that very same year). "Elektrobank" is no less intense and pushes things to the max: dancing to these tracks is like immersing yourself in a mantra as old as the world, in an acidic trance that drags you downward. Like digging your own grave.

"Piku" and "Setting Sun" let you catch your breath, plunging the mind into distant, exotic journeys, a sort of lysergic adventure through the backstreets of London, among masala and kebabs. "Setting Sun", among other things, kicks off a highly successful collaboration with Noel Gallagher, which perfectly reflects the standing the chemical duo had within the English music scene of the period.

The rest of the album hits the accelerator again, and between intense techno digressions ("Don't Stop The Rock"), brief psychedelic glimpses ("Lost In The K-Hole" and "Where Do I Begin" with Beth Orton's splendid voice), it all builds to the long final ride: "Private Psychedelic Reel", a sort of nearly ten-minute ethno-breakbeat suite.

Dig Your Own Hole is the album that turned the Chemical Brothers into a true institution within Nineties dance music: like a train perpetually on the run, slicing through an ideal post-modern underground metropolis, caught between ethnic echoes and moments of pure modern psychedelia.

An amphetamine surrender

We're in the middle of 1999. The new millennium is at the door. The chemical brothers are by now genuine international stars, in high demand everywhere on planet Earth. The charts are waiting for nothing else but the third album from the Simons-Rowlands firm, and the Orinoco Studios see a parade of guests: from Noel Gallagher, co-writer of "Let Forever Be", to Bernard Sumner of New Order and Bobby Gillespie of Primal Scream: the former lending vocal support on the duo's biggest hit single, "Out Of Control", and the latter in the producer's chair; not to mention Jonathan Donahue (Mercury Rev), on piano, vocals and guitar on "Dream On", and the celebrated muse of Mazzy Star, Hope Sandoval, simply moving on "Asleep From Day".

Given all this, Surrender could only be the pinnacle of the Chemical Brothers' career, not just for the precious collaborations involved - often explicitly requested by the guests themselves (see Gallagher), won over by the English producers' creation - but above all for the flawless quality and energy of each individual moment, never before so varied in melodic, rhythmic and sonic makeup.

Surrender mixes pretty much everything together. "Hey Boy, Hey Girl" is pure bull-headed dancey stomp, gaudy when it needs to be, capable of flooring even the most stubborn disco bullfighter. "Orange Wedge" is synthesized broken-beat with jittery analogue inserts scattered seemingly at random between one muted cadence and the next. In sharp contrast, we find "Under The Influence" and "Dream On". The former is a sudden attack of techno neurosis, and follows perfectly from the robotic intro of "Music: Response" (written by none other than Missy Elliott). The latter, meanwhile, closes the curtain with a genuine pop crescendo, fairy-tale-like and floating through every melodic branch.

The success of Surrender is so significant that expectations for the new record are sky-high. In 2002 the English duo release their fourth studio album: Come With Us.

It's an ideal "synthetic" journey through the coolest musical routes of the past decade, a crossover of techno and funk, psychedelia and acid house, refined dance music and tribal beat (as in the ancestral "It Began In Afrika"). Compared to the previous record, the dance-house component is more pronounced, as confirmed by the opening title track: a blend of groove and breakbeat that in some way echoes the "Block Rockin' Beats" that first launched them onto the world stage. "Denmark" is a stylistic exercise in disco-music mode. "Star Guitar" hides, behind its apparent coldness, a highly elaborate rhythmic weave. "My Elastic Eye" combines cinematic-flavoured loops with obsessive percussion.

But, in this ocean of purest electronics, guitars also surface - as in "The State We're In", a psychedelic ballad enriched by Beth Orton's voice - and even Brazilian percussion, as in "Pioneer Skies" (which opens with a bizarre evocation of late-Sixties progressive rock).

In conclusion, Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons continue their transformation from djs into underground electronic composers, keeping themselves in the enviable position of being at once a worldwide success story and a cult phenomenon for devotees of electronic experimentation.

Despite this, Come With Us is not received with enthusiasm by critics, who were expecting a record in the vein of Surrender.

After the partial disappointment of Come With Us, both fans and industry experts hold high hopes for the new record, announced for release in January 2005. Push The Button, however, adds nothing to the two alchemists' biography, and in fact remains far from their best work, well below Exit Planet Dust. The duo try to stay alive and current; they succeed, for instance, on "Galvanize", the album's opening track and lead single: Simons and Rowlands confirm themselves as unbeatable sponges, able to soak up the planet's biggest musical trends and pair red-hot hip-hop with the ethnic flavours of an odalisque sample - and at a time when everyone dreams of journeys to the far ends of the world, each of us finds a piece of ourselves and our own paths in constructions like this one; the rapping is supplied by Q-Tip of A Tribe Called Quest. Hip-hop moments return further on too, in "Left Right", where the title alone lets us guess that the "chemical brothers" have serious intentions and want to have their say on political matters as well. And yet, running through the tracks of Push The Button, one gets a constant sense of deja vu and the certainty that in five years' time no one will be recommending this as one of the Chemical's best records.

Another handicap is that fluidity is often lacking: many songs are stretched out as far as exasperatingly possible, as if going past the five-minute mark were some kind of must; but then what's the point of the remix (a format the duo are acknowledged masters of)? The usual illustrious collaborations aren't missing either: this time there's no Noel Gallagher, but we do get Mercury Rev on "Close Your Eyes" which, in all honesty, borders on tedious, and Tim Burgess of the Charlatans on "The Boxer", where the union of the two forces produces a result less interesting than either party on its own.

Plenty of question marks, but also the odd pleasant moment, like the further quasi-ethnic touch of "Hold Tight London", with fine tribal-house percussion and a vocal turn from Anna Lynne Williams of Trespassers William. On "Believe" many will recognise the voice of Kele Okereke of Bloc Party. Another surge, though we're almost at the end of the record by now, comes with "Marvo Ging", with its charming slide guitar sample; but unfortunately here too the idea gets stretched a bit too thin as the track develops. "Surface To Air", finally, is their typical electro gallop, alternating driving beats with atmospheric pauses, carrying all the lessons taught by New Order.

Push The Button is a record that needs to be played at full blast, a record built for the dancefloor, and it's in that spirit that it should be listened to, digested and judged.

In 2007 it's time for We Are The Night; although the Chemical Brothers remain very active on the live front and continue to set countless dj sets alight around the globe, on record they fail to recapture past glories. Or rather: they try, coming out with a sad, self-celebratory revival. The real problem, aside from an actual lack of new ideas, is that the one idea left standing - alone like the sodium particle from that famous ad - is confined to a span running from 1990 to 1999, because every song except the single "Do It Again" (itself outshone by the two remixes included on the Ep) sounds like it was written and played at least eight years earlier. There can be style in doing a revival, even in farcically repeating oneself, but not like this - this is exposing yourself to public ridicule with no excuses. Because you can also quietly admit you've had enough to drink without continuing to pester everyone else in the club, and unfortunately the impression you're left with here is exactly that: an insistence that's gone on far longer than it should, a kind of unstoppable inertia. An inability to do anything else.

For the record, "A Modern Midnight Conversation" is the only other song that attempts to redeem itself, rediscovering the glories of certain sounds à la Dig Your Own Hole, but it's too little too late, because it no longer manages to represent anything at all: neither a snapshot of an emerging scene, nor of an ever-wider audience drawing closer to clubrave culture. The chemical brothers' problem is precisely their detachment from everything happening around them, despite the supposedly lavish collaborations, shut away in their own little studio, propped up on the now-greying glories of the past. If We Are The Night reflected reality, it would be a disturbing message, because in this night you wouldn't see a thing - you'd be navigating blind through an obscene record.

Just when the duo seemed destined for a passive career, coasting on the inertia of their early, landmark works, along comes the swipe of the tail from an old animal too proud to admit defeat. Further (2010), the English duo's comeback, harnesses the rhetoric of big beat and transforms it, pushing it to a different level — on one hand more current, on the other more mature.

That our heroes are keen to prove they haven't gone stale is clear right from the start: "Snow"-"Escape Velocity" is a top-class one-two punch that first softens you up and then stuns you, with a synth crescendo exploding into a squared-off, tremendously effective beat. And there's no shortage of low blows either, like "Horse Power", pure vintage harsh-techno power. Between sophisticated, hazy electro-pop ("Dissolve") and killer melodies over solid beds of beat and sweat (the closing trio, with "Swoon" as the undisputed star), the Chemical Brothers pick their career back up with vigor and craft, marking a major turning point in style and composition.

In 2015 comes Born In The Echoes, an album that definitively relaunches the career and the cult status of the chemical twins. If this record has a flaw, it's the venial sin of falling back on ideas already well developed and tested in the past (see "Go", with Q-Tip on vocals, the same one from "Galvanize"). Born In The Echoes is an album of songs, and of duets that aren't all equally successful, among which at least a couple are decidedly high-profile (and shrewdly calculated): Beck sings on the closing "Wide Open", pleasant enough, but such a hyped-up pairing has every right to expect more. Things go decidedly better with St. Vincent, who takes center stage (voice and guitar) on "Under Neon Lights", built as if the Madonna who dreamed of being Bjork (the one from "Bedtime Stories") had merged with the world-music clangor of Goat: a fine crossover, with a result that's anything but forced. But here come the happiest moments, standing out in the middle section, the part that works best, cementing the Chemical Brothers' definitive redemption: it's the stretch running from "EML Ritual" (featuring Ali Love) to "Reflexion", passing through "I'll See You There" (the most "rock" of the bunch) and "Just Bang". It's in these twenty minutes that Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons prove themselves absolute masters when they decide to work through progressive accumulation, setting aside the pop-song format to focus on more blatantly hyper-trendy club-culture accents.

After so much beauty, it's no surprise that tracks like "Taste Of Honey" (with Stephanie Dosen of Snowbird and Chenai Zinyuku) and the atmospheric "Radiate" (featuring the highly rated Canadian saxophonist Colin Stetson) feel like filler, and that the title track (with Cate Le Bon) just gets by, utterly unable to add any further spice to an otherwise rich menu.

The Electronic Battle Weapons

Electronic Battle Weapon — once you learn the English, the mystery is solved: weapons for the electronic battle. Alongside the singles and albums, the two world-leading standard-bearers of the rave sound unleash devastating dj tools, released exclusively on vinyl.

From the first slash of "It Doesn't Matter" on the A-side and "Don't Stop The Rock" as the b-side, the Electronic Battle Weapons have become a cult object for anyone wanting to play the Chemical Brothers' most aggressive material. These are, in fact, extended or simply rawer versions of what will often end up on the following album.

Take number three: "Under The Influence", which we know on Surrender in a tidied-up, arranged form — but try the kick in the teeth released in 1998 on Freetyle Dust, or if you prefer, play for your I-like-the-chemicals-but-I-only-know-HeyBoyHeyGirl friends EBW number six: let "Hoops" become a supersonic acid take that turns dark hair blond and bearded faces clean-shaven.

But Simons and Rowlands reach supreme ecstasy in 2004 by releasing number seven in the collection: Chemical Brothers call ravers. A four-to-the-floor stomp slammed into the ground, a fast, dry arpeggio, scattered analog textures and a vocal sample reciting "where are all my children now?" — if up to that point every weapon had been released and consequently renamed to appear on record, this time the chain breaks: "Electronic Battle Weapon 7" it was, and so it remains; to friends it will be known as "Acid Children", and no name could ever be more fitting.

Eight, nine and ten: "Saturate" on We Are The Night, the b-side of the single "The Salmon Dance", and to round out the ten, the last one chronologically, closing a cycle of weapons meant not just for battle but for electronic destruction — gifting, even to those who in 2010 know only mp3s and file sharing, the complete EBW catalogue on CD as a companion to the Brotherhood anthology.

So now that you've reached the end of this piece, get up off your chair and make the old-fashioned effort of heading to a record shop, ask the unfriendly clerk for any one of these bootleg releases. And then repent.

The chemical brothers get back on track three years after the electro bender of Born In The Echoes, a record dominated by the absence — by now a given — of a surprise factor that increasingly belongs only to their glorious past. However, while time marches on relentlessly even for two pioneers like Ed Simons and Tom Rowlands, the consolidation of sonic ideas, grown ever more precise and enticing album after album, highlights an underlying expectation that is at least logical and fair, free from demands for innovation that would frankly be out of place when directed at someone who gave such an emblematic jolt to late-last-century popular electronic music, who fired off the final fireworks of a rave culture that today remains the absolute inspiration for entire fleets of young producers.

Beyond everything the big beat movement came to mean, in 2019 the Chemical Brothers seem as sharp as two kids. No Geography is solid proof that class can remain intact, especially when ambition stays locked in the chest of a few precious ideas that the two musicians have always jealously (and skillfully) guarded. It's a secret replayed at the end of a decade that, for electronic music, certainly marked a moment of deep reflection, watching certain trends and fads that once seemed destined for a bright future come to an end (see: Dubstep). Musical language, however, keeps perpetually renewing itself, and in an era marked by the frantic intersection of multiple, often wildly different elements and modes of listening, this time it almost seems as though Rowlands and Simons have looked intently to their own past with a modern drive — typical of the innovator — but with a pronounced "clubber" streak that had, to be fair, somewhat vanished from their radar in their most recent outings. And in this sort of concept album that aims to erase geographical borders and, with them, ideological and cultural barriers (the reference to Brexit and the walls separating the US and Mexico), the Chemical Brothers push the accelerator to the max toward an ensemble of sounds that embraces Italo disco, plunderphonics and the ever-present house and techno, explicitly abandoning the trend most in vogue in the music industry right now: hip hop. Just hit play once and you'll notice the broad sonic palette available to your ears. The opening "Eve of Destruction" contains a vocal sample from the legendary "Weekend" by Class Action ("Maybe I'll find a friend to spend the weekend") and builds an unbridled climax, the vivid opening of a party held on some desert island, perhaps with the best Norman Cook taking turns at the controls.

Continuing, awestruck, our ride on what we might call a freshly polished and rediscovered carousel, "Free Yourself" (the first single from the record) reveals a more "traditionalist" electro-house drift, just as in "MAH" (Mad as Hell) their brutal arsenal of sounds plainly takes shape (what happens at the 2:05 mark would deserve a feature all its own): a perfect lesson in the history of electronic music, dragging us through a tunnel running from acid-techno to house, all without ever losing the sense of modern dance, of that lightning bolt which for forty years has been clearing away our melancholy and pushing us toward life's undefined shores. Shores that are, frankly, joyous, welcoming, dense with that need to properly reunite after all the time lost and all the time lived to the fullest. Pastures of memory that know no geography, and in which it's still magical to find ourselves again, within the groove of a miracle that, in its own way, is still vivid.

In 2023 the chemists set off again with their tenth studio album, For That Beautiful Feeling, driven by a desire to erase borders, reaffirming an itch at the controls that's still danceable, but in which an underlying ethical approach also takes the lead, born from the will to exercise a kind of programmed chaos through a few bars that celebrate both the joy of living and an elusive harmony.

The opening, moreover, is as energetic as they come. “Live Again” with Halo Maud on vocals is a statement of intent. A wonderful escape toward the sky, rainbows, the beach, all the good things – life, in short. It's the first track of the bunch and the third single released from the album, preceded by “No Reason” and “The Darkness That You Fear”: the former with a post-punk bite, given the sample of “Courts of War”, opening track from the 1980 EP “Flesh As Property” by London duo Second Layer, splattered relentlessly shortly after the one-minute mark, and the latter emulating a figurative undertow, complete with dream-pop melody and a Balearic change of pace worthy of Todd Terje.

Fairy-tale moments with guitar flourishes à la Chic flipped on their head by electric trickery lift the decisive leap of “Fountains”. Meanwhile there's too much formula in “Goodbye”, which seems fished out of the earliest big beat playbook and just given a fresh coat of paint for the occasion. The same goes for “Weight”, which instead sounds like an imaginary, badly timed collaboration with Fatboy Slim. Amid the ups and downs, friend Beck also pops up on “Skipping Like A Stone”, with whom the chemists had already collaborated on the 2015 single “Wide Open”. The chemistry is good, and the approach is shared with the other tracks on the record, between dreamy pauses meant to underline the urge to escape from everything, in search of uncharted territory useful for saving oneself and others (“I wanna go / Where no one goes / I don’t want to let you go / I don’t want to lose your love”).

The big beat of the golden years then returns on the explosive “Feels Like I Am Dreaming”, which, you can bet, will prove extremely useful live, especially for its obsessive, psychedelic, and thus strobe-lit vein. By contrast there's the ethereal closing of the title track, once again with the crystalline voice of France's Halo Maud implying, in a loop, a feeling of total ecstasy.

For That Beautiful Feeling is a good comeback, notwithstanding a few overly saccharine moments. Sure, it lacks that one knockout bombshell you'd rightfully expect from two giants like Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons. But there's fun to be had. Pure and simple. Which is a rare thing these days. As well as a welcome one.

Ride the wave of great music

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