The Chemical Brothers - We Are The Night

Freestyle Dust / Virgin

The last true survivors from the mid-90s school of crossover indie-dance, The Chemical Brothers have now made it to an impressive sixth studio album. In the process they’ve outlived contemporaries such as Leftfield, Orbital and Underworld, who have either bit the dust or are operating on the fringes of popular music. Dynamic duo Tom and Ed have managed to remain at the forefront of mainstream dance throughout their mammoth career via a combination of sticking to their guns and switching things up enough to keep it interesting. It’s an approach that has paid dividends.

If you lay all their albums side-by-side you can chart the evolution of their sound from its beat-heavy, hip-hop oriented origins to a progressively more house-tinged and uplifting vein in a successive step-by-step fashion. With each record they’ve moved somewhere new, but kept at least one foot in the past. In this way their genre-defining debut ‘Exit Planet Dust’ sounds very different from ‘We Are The Night’, yet both are distinctly Chemical Brothers. We are dealing now with an outfit who have honed their craft to a ridiculously fine art, melding the elements of their pioneering output to produce an album that is diverse enough to grip your attention for the duration without ever dropping the energy level.

As always, there are a number of key collaborations. Newcomers Klaxons fit right in alongside their progenitors on ‘All Rights Reversed’, and Willy Mason’s drawl is a good accompaniment to the dub-infused ‘Battle Scars’. The standout hook-up though could well be rapper Fatlip’s appearance on ‘The Salmon Dance’, an effortless and simple yet devastatingly effective track that worms its way straight into your brain.

In 2005 ‘Push The Button’ was saved by the standout songs like ‘Galvanize’, but this album works in spite of the fact that there are no obvious single tracks. It’s the most well-rounded, complete and cohesive album the Chemical Brothers have made in years. Up-for-it dancefloor smashes, beat-infested workouts and down tempo, lush melodica all sit side-by-side seamlessly. These are old dogs who won’t need to learn any new tricks, they just keep inventing new ones.

Words_Jonny Tiernan

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DOWNLOAD: ‘Do It Again’, ‘The Salmon Dance’, ‘The Pills Won’t Help You Know’

Issue #52 - Very Bro-some

Featuring Panama Kings, ASIWYFA, an investigation into DIY touring, details of what over 25 of the finest NI bands are up to in 2009 and much more.