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April 12, 2019 - Virgin EMI/Astralwerks
The relationship between an ear-worm and a lasting piece, something that grows with time and a flash in the pan, work that has a foundation behind it and risk-taking one offs.
The Chemical Brothers’ single Elektrobank and accompanying tracks on the single’s CD as well as the Spike Jonze directed music video were some of my first interactions with electronic music, or at least music that I was aware of being electronic and not just being composed of some sort of magic ether piped through speakers. This was rebellious music. This was unnatural music. This was scary music. This was raw music. This was dance music.
This music feels different and the same. It might be my personal bias, but I feel a lot of Aurora Aksnes in the album, both on the tracks she is credited with and the project as a whole.
Sometimes parts of a track bother me. I’m not typically a fan of repetitive, tongue-in-cheek lyrics, spoken or otherwise. Sometimes synth noises can be grating. Sometimes samples can be overused. Sometimes patterns are broken up in unpleasing ways.
One can easily get the sense that Simons and Rowlands are thoroughly steeped in music culture. Everything is a callback to something that came before.
‘Eve of Destruction’ is an intro track and it serves that purpose well and not much else. The percussive structure is pleasant enough but no component other than the vocal repetition of the title is given enough room to go anywhere. It’s not a great title, and it really doesn’t take long to wring it out.
‘Bango’ makes me redact saying ‘Eve of Destruction’ serving the purpose of the intro well. This is the real intro to the project, and it should be the opener for all the live shows that are to come. Drum fills abound amidst Aurora Aksnes’s airy vocal layering. Everything except the underlying beat deviates from its origin at some point. The outro to ‘Bango’ and the intro to ‘No Geography’ is beautiful and should be given its own track to exist in.
‘No Geography’ loses some of the energy the previous track carefully built up, somewhat intentionally, but I suspect not entirely what was supposed to happen. The main synth lines and overall grandeur of the piece make me question why it isn’t the final track. Maybe time will tell.
‘Got to Keep On’ is a pillar of this project. The richly textured funk-heavy groove is very approachable, the structure suits a primetime DJ set; it even has its own crowd-hype-up-monologue built in. It brings back strong feelings of the Budweiser Select advertisements that featured ‘Galvanize,’ and the orchestral chime riff is straight out of a department store Christmas jingle in the absolute best of ways.
‘Gravity Drops’ marks a softer side from Simons and Rowlands. Delicate plucks stretch themselves over a piercing snare while clouds of disparate synth noise and captured audio float lazily by.
‘The Universe Sent Me’ is an Aurora-forward piece of restlessness personified. It has trouble settling in, never really feeling comfortable being alone with itself. Perhaps it doesn’t need to settle though. Anxiety is persistent and deserves consideration.
‘We’ve Got to Try’ is the other pillar of the album. The marrying of light and heavy, soft and gritty, nostalgia and forward-thinking, it all works. It takes its rightful place amongst the strong catalogue of Chemical Brothers pump up motivational pieces.
‘Free Yourself’ was a hard pass the first time I listened to it, but it has since grown on me. A bored voice makes some suggestions of freeing oneself and something about dancing. What can only be described as a video game glitch causes infinite 8-bit penguin sprites to spawn in a room filled with lava, and their death screams make up the cacophony that makes the main synth? line of the track. It’s good fun.
‘MAH’ represents the project’s second wind, throwing a bunch of loudness at the wall and watching it all stick. The meaty, vibrating synth line halfway through the track steals the show, and the whole thing feels like everything is gaining speed even though we know the album is about to end.
‘Catch Me I’m Falling’ brings us back to where we need to be and shows me now why ‘No Geography’ was not the final track. It could have been the second to last track though. Switch it with ‘MAH,’ I say. Frequent Chemical Brothers collaborator Stephanie Dosen provides soothing vocals over a rich layer cake of emotion I’m sure would do any late night/early morning festival finale proud.
There are moments here, important yet fleeting moments of emotion and openness and effortlessness. Maybe I’ve been closed off these past few weeks. Maybe I’m feeling fatigued from the seasonal shift. Maybe time will tell. 🍍