The Chemical Brothers
The Chemical Brothers have produced the ideal record for anyone feeling nostalgic for 1997. For the first couple of tracks, at least, Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons recall the urgent, pumping dance-as-trench-warfare future shock of their double-barreled bestsellers Exit Planet Dust and Dig Your Own Hole. Then the pair retreats to the juice bar at the gym, making good only with a lovely guitar sample from ’60s pop group the Association on “Hoops” and the Exorcist-theme-on-toy-piano-like loop that opens the otherwise by-the-numbers “My Elastic Eye.”
Dust and Hole have held up well, even given the way sample maniacs such as the Avalanches recently have raised the stakes well past what appears to be the Brothers’ comfort zone. What Rowlands and Simons accomplished with those discs wasn’t groundbreaking music but a triumph of accessibility, making big-beat dance culture available to a mass audience who thought it was just picking up a great vocal track featuring the guy from Oasis (Hole‘s “Setting Sun”). Now that similar sounds have infiltrated commercials and movie trailers while rock groups once eager for an infusion of enigmatic electronica have rediscovered simple three-chord ass-shaking, the Chemical Brothers find themselves in a class by themselves. And earning Cs.
The de rigueur big-name guest shots prove disappointing. Beth Orton is back for the forgettable “The State We’re In,” having long since bettered her previous Chemicals cameos with two stellar albums of her own. Former Verve leader Richard Ashcroft, with a largely useless solo disc under his belt, assumes the Noel Gallagher position for Come With Us‘ climactic finale, “The Test,” a wannabe epic that fails to withstand the scrutiny of repeat listening.
And that turns out to be what props up or tears down Rowlands and Simons’ tracks. By now predictable, the Chemical Brothers can still get fine results big-beating a dead horse with the right rhythms and samples. But Come With Us suffers from a paucity of both, substituting bombast for the former and somnambulant let’s-buy-a-Volkswagen trance for the latter. It’s a solidly engaging hour — if you’re working out. But fans of the former DJs’ static electricity will find that Come With Us is the disappointing product of a couple of guys stuck on a treadmill.
