PUSH THE BUTTON CHEMICAL BROTHERS SERIES
What is more, they became interested in turning their malleable sound to the service of a series of remarkably canny musical pastiches. The Chems were still musical magpies, but their appropriation became increasingly subtle to the point of invisibility. The music was still electronic, the beats still heavy, but the end result was strangely organic. If 1997’s Dig Your Own Hole was still clearly a product of synthesizers and samplers, 1999’s Surrender was the first step towards something entirely different. Half the fun of their early material came through in the interaction of multiple diffuse elements to create a kind of postmodern musical synthesis: a handful of eclectic noises artfully combined in order to create something much greater than the mere sum of its parts.īut as their sound changed and grew, it also grew more streamlined. Sampling had been used in dance music since the very beginning, but never on such a wholesale basis. This is how they defined their early “Big Beat” sound, by applying the techniques of musical collage, which had been refined by the production work of the Bomb Squad and Jack Dangers, to dance music.
In the beginning, the Chemical Brothers’ most obvious influences, besides the acid house of their college years, were Public Enemy and Meat Beat Manifesto. They’re still making the same type of music they were a decade ago, still creating powerful pop music out of the intersections between disparate genres, but their frame of reference has seen geometric growth. More than anything else, the development of the Chems’ sound has been the gradual refinement of a basic template. Which is not to say that the driving beats and powerful basslines are gone, merely that they have changed along with the Chems overall sound. The overarching mood of this album - notwithstanding two hip-hop numbers - is melodic, and those who come looking for the same kind of monstrously powerful percussion that fueled “Afrika”, “Hey Boy Hey Girl”, and of course “Block Rockin’ Beats” might be slightly disappointed.
Push the Button seems to have resolved this conflict merely through eliminating the stomping dancefloor hits that have defined so much of their past output. Whereas in the past every Chemical Brothers album had seemed to be an organic whole, Come With Us seemed strangely diffused, torn between strong dancefloor numbers and relatively emaciated stabs at more melodic material. The problem was that the rest of the album, the parts that fell between the driving singles, was somewhat unfocused. The problem with Come With Us was not that it lacked a handful of truly great tracks - “Star Guitar”, “It Began in Afrika” and “The Test” were all instant classics. The Chemical Brothers stand as a solitary force in contemporary music, regardless of the vicissitudes of fashion. The fact that neither of them sing and that their music has only sporadic relations with conventional instrumentation only makes it easier for trend-setting chauvinists to dismiss them.īut if electronic music seems slightly gauche in the year 2005, it’s no fault of the music itself. If this fact has been sometimes obscured by the loud and brassy nature of their singles, those who have listened with an open ear have come to recognize the Chems as perhaps the single most dexterous chameleons in modern music, in addition to being two of the most consistently underrated songwriters in any field of pop. Since the release of 1995’s Exit Planet Dust, the Chemical Brothers - Tom Roland and Ed Simons - have stood at the forefront of musical innovation. Rather, Push the Button seems to represent both a return to form and a bold reinvention, if such a thing is possible, effortlessly evoking the Brothers’ greatest achievements while simultaneously striking out into tantalizing new directions. The same flabby mid-career languor that has marred the recent output of important artists like the Prodigy, Massive Attack and the Orb seems to have bypassed our boys. If it is easy to conclude - in hindsight - that 2001’s Come With Us was something of a disappointment, it is a great relief to report that Push the Button represents a triumphant return to form for the Chemical Brothers.
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