#17 on the 2023 Bacon Top 31 — The Chemical Brothers

January 15, 2024 by Royal Stuart in Top 31

For That Beautiful Feeling by The Chemical Brothers

The Bacon Review has been a fan of Ed Simons and Tom Rowlands’ big-beat electronica outfit The Chemical Brothers for a very very long long time. Their stellar debut album, Exit Planet Dust, came out in 1995, and I loved it and their subsequent releases (1997’s Dig Your Own Hole and 1999’s Surrender). You might think music that resonated with someone in the heart of their 20s youth may no longer relate to the nearly-50-year-old father of two he has become in the subsequent decades, but you’d be very wrong. Granted, the six albums that came out between 1999 and 2019 didn’t land as squarely in my day-to-day listening. But there’s something about the band’s stellar tenth album, For That Beautiful Feeling, that hits different.

This is the Chemical Brothers back in their 1990s glory. Intense bass beats, sampled and repeated vocals about love and life, big sweeping crescendos that take over your body no matter where you are when you hear them — what you remember most about the band is all mostly there. The only real difference is the Beth Orton and Noel Gallagher cameos have been replaced by the French singer/songwriter Halo Maud and everywhere-man Beck.

The band has released a handful of videos from the album:

The above “Live Again” features a dancer stuck in a loop, continually stepping out of her trailer into an ever-changing landscape, brought on by some barely-scene tentacle-laden alien.
No Reason is a great song shown to the green-screen escapades of a dancing marching band
Goodbye features a colorful couple in love
Skipping Like a Stone ft. Beck is the most ambitious video, but takes the idea of a skipped stone with a hero complex to its illogical extreme.

If you liked The Chemical Brothers back in the day, and if your ears can still hear and your body can still move, then you should definitely check out Feeling. And if the band is new to you, give it a listen to hear what people were dancing to 30 years ago. I’m genuinely curious to hear a current 20-something’s take on the style of dance music that was created 10 years before they were born. Beyoncé, with her most recent house-driven masterpiece, RENNAISANCE (#2 just last year), and others have been giving everyone a taste of what 90s dance music was like. The Chemical Brothers were one of the originators. It’s time for us all to get re-educated.

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In May 2013 at a nondescript Seattle space called 1927 Events, two-thirds of Magic Mountain High—Germany's David Moufang (aka Move D) and the Netherlands' Jordan Czamanski of Juju & Jordash—teamed up for a live performance that made everyone in the room feel privileged to have witnessed it. It was the kind of set during which you say to yourself, “I hope to hell somebody's recording this.” Thankfully, somebody was doing just that, and the 99-minute Live In Seattle is the sterling result. People throw around the word “deep” to describe electronic music with cavalier frequency, but in the case of Moufang and Czamanski (who also records as Jordan GCZ), that adjective barely encapsulates the kind of fathomless sound they create. Their work as Magic Mountain High—which includes Juju & Jordash's Gal Aner—combines the two artists' spring-loaded, psychedelic techno and libido-stoking house, exponentially multiplying their propulsive and disorienting qualities. Live In Seattle captures them working at the zenith of their improvisational powers for a rabid crowd—despite their European gear not functioning and having to use unfamiliar equipment, which is a testament to the pair's ability to create and adjust on the fly. The show begins with anticipatory cymbal taps and a beautifully morose melodica motif that wouldn't sound out of place in an Ennio Morricone soundtrack. A few minutes in, faint pulses enter earshot and a minute later the clap-enhanced beats and synth bass burst into the forefront to form a strutting midtempo rhythm with a subliminal drone swirling beneath it. Masters of dynamics, Moufang and Czamanski incrementally intensify and ingeniously arrange the elements, especially that underlying keyboard drone, until you're in a state of panic and ecstasy. Over the course of the set, the two producers flaunt their expertise for pacing. They avoid the obvious and subvert expectations throughout the performance, sporadically letting the beats drop out in order to luxuriate on a particularly alien organ oscillation (see especially the one near the beginning of the vinyl version of Live In Seattle's A-side), a sinister bass rumble, an ominously pulsating synth, an unsettling thumb piano motif, or a mind-warping 303 acid ripple, to name just a handful of examples. Of course, Moufang and Czamanski also keep things danceable for stretches of time and about 78 minutes in, they even shift out of their foundation of oddity and into heavenly techno mode with a gloriously ascendant melody (which you can hear on the B-side of the vinyl version). For their well-deserved encore, Moufang and Czamanski reprise the intro's mournful melodica reverie and then infiltrate it with a series of percolating and disorienting bleeps and a celestial drone worthy of New Age legend Laraaji. This stellar ambient coda reflects Moufang and Czamanski's exceptional, eccentric musicality. Techno is not known for its live albums, but regardless, Live In Seattle sets the standard for the format. With its abundant and sublime tunefulness, textural richness, and enchantingly enigmatic tangents, Live In Seattle takes you on a trip that's as long, strange, and stimulating as anything Miles Davis' electric bands of the '70s engineered.

#30 on the 2015 Bacon Top 31

December 02, 2015 by Royal Stuart

Live in Seattle by Moufang / Czamanski

Time was, I would listen to “techno” music all the time. Underworld, the Orb, Aphex Twin, Orbital, Chemical Bros. — this was the world I lived in. And I’d find myself at a club, every weekend, gyrating and flailing (I’m not sure I should call it “dancing”) to whatever the DJ was spinning. But that was the 90s, and things are quite a bit different for me now.

Musical tastes change, priorities shift, and the prospect of doing something akin to exercise past 11pm on any given night no longer brings the appeal it used to. But every so often I come across something that brings that drive, that desire to move, back. Enter Germany’s David Moufang (aka Move D) and the Netherlands’ Jordan Czamanski (aka Jordan GCZ, also of Juju & Jordash), collectively known as Moufang / Czamanski.¹

Performed back in May 2013 but not released until October of this year, this set is the definition of background music. Put it on, and watch yourself become more effective at your behind-the-screen desk job. But be careful, because you may hit a point (probably around the 78-minute mark) where you find yourself bouncing in your seat, taken out of whatever it is you were typing, fully immersed in this digital landscape.

^{1. Add in a second Nederlander, Gal Aner, also of Juju & Jordash, and you get yet another group: Magic Mountain High. Check them all out.↩}

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31. High by Royal Headache

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The Chemical Brothers — Go

July 31, 2015 by Royal Stuart

My love of electronic music has waned since its heyday in the mid-90s (back when we called it “techno”), but there are a few acts from that time that still get me excited when they release a new album. The Chemical Brothers are one such act, and they’ve just released their eigth studio album, Born in the Echoes.

I’m only just now listening to it for the first time, but if the rest of the album is as good as “Go” (don’t judge a song by its video), then it’s definitely going to be one of the year’s best. In addition to Q-Tip (from A Tribe Called Quest), Beck and Annie Clark (aka St. Vincent) make notable appearances on the album.

In the 90s (when I was a poor college student) I would have had to wait until I found this album in the used-CD bins at the local record shop, to which every trip meant leaving with a stack of new music in my hot little hands. Nowadays the equivalent is a flurry of album purchases on a single day, monthly or so. It’s not the same, and I long for the days of rifling through the used sections, but who has room or need for all that plastic? Not me. But a new Chemical Brothers album? Hell yes.