Исполнитель: Chemical Brothers, The
Дата выхода: 24.01.2005
Издатель: Virgin
CHEMICAL QUESTIONS, CHEMICAL ANSWERS, CHEMICAL TWISTS
AND CHEMICAL NOW.
How is it now?
a. The new Chemical Brothers album Push The Button is, as it should be, the same as all their others, and totally different. It’s a follow up to their first album, and a follow up to their last album, and a follow up to the ones in between. One or two of their previous albums are a follow up to this one.
b. The same, because it is the Chemical Brothers, and they do what they have always done, build beats that become lead sounds and which battle with noises that pile in from how they imagine pop history to be, what they believe pop to be, a thing you dance to, a thing you get in the way of, a thing that happens abruptly, a thing that happens to itself, a thing that drives you into the future. The same, because this is what they do, grab noise, break beat all over it, invite singers in to add language and merge attitude, get real emotional about the way music can make the world go round, fast, faster, fastest, with a little bit of slow, a touch of gentle, a push of contemplation, a feast of effect.
c. Different, because the Brothers are not what they were, where they were, who they were, who we thought they were, who they thought they were. Different, because the way they compile time, rhythm, words, beats, slang, pulse, voice isn’t how they did it last time, or the time before, or the time before that, give or take the fact that they still like it loud, and they still like it heavy, and they still like to shriek, and they still like to locate a place where dream and reality meet at the slipping, sliding centre of sound.
d. It’s what they do, thinking up tracks, and songs, and instrumentals that they would like to have had available as DJ’s, sounds that sound like the sounds they would want to slip between something dead original and something that’s simply fun, between something inspiring and something that, in many ways, is just insane. It’s what they do, beginning an album with a warning, and then a threat, and then a promise, and then they get somewhere, and take it from there.
e. The way this track, or that track, with a title like Galvanize, or The Big Jump, or Shake Break Bounce builds up is supreme, perfectly done and impossible to imagine being done better.
f. The Chemical Brothers always did think for themselves.
How was it in the beginning?
a. There was history.
b. There was Public Enemy, Cabaret Voltaire, My Bloody Valentine, Renegade Soundwave, making big sounds across the universe, tearing up the neighbourhood of space, beating up the time of their lives, and there was Bob Dylan, the Smiths, the Cocteau Twins, somewhere between sound and word, coming down gently and driven on the sure side of song.
c. 2005. Push the Button is the same and different because it is braggy, brain banging and blissed in and out, the same and different because it is edited and extended by a couple of characters who have always believed in the same thing, whether they were nerd teenagers or nerd pop stars. The Brothers believe ! in the power of music to re-arrange mood at will.
d. 1988.There were two students who weren’t from Manchester but who were in Manchester, taking the same medieval history course at Manchester University. There was the music that they listened to when they were growing up, which we know for a fact included Kraftwerk, and very possibly Blue Oyster Cult.
e. Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons, who weren’t brothers but were both male, and found a love for each other somewhere inside the love they had for music. Ed, born in 1970, loved airplanes and musicals as a kid, and then loved New Order, Tom, born 1971, loved bagpipes as a kid, and then loved Heaven 17.
f. They went north to study, from South London and Kingston-Upon-Times, because of the Manchester music scene. They found themselves at their University, tripping back to the 12th Century, at a time when Manchester was the musical capital of the world – it was right in the middle of a renaissance, it was Detroit, San Francisco, Berlin, New York, Liverpool, Chicago, Nashville, Sheffield, beats and minds and history and midnights and grooves and pulses and dreams and speeds were cascading all around them.
g. Look – there’s Manchester’s Hacienda, which was a nightclub located in the Manchester that was all in the mind, a Manchester that was somewhere between the Sex Pistols at the Lesser Free Trade Hall 1976 where time started and the Chicago Warehouse where time was quadrupled, a Manchester that became the deep, rapid soul centre for all this blending and sending out of bliss and beat, of house, disco, hip hop, Italy, rare groove jazz, northern soul, hip-hop, and the alternative dance of those who’d just come through the door.
h.
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