Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons have pretty much kept their place at the top of the pile of dance since 1995’s ‘Exit Planet Dust’ propelled them into mainstream consciousness. The real reason for this is simple – they are dance music for people who don’t like dance music. People who you’ll never find lost amongst strangers at 5am in Fabric, people who find KISS FM too hardcore – these are the people who have no trouble in putting on ‘Let Forever Be’ while chopping onions. That’s not to say The Chemical Brothers don’t have hardcore appeal – they clearly do, as otherwise they’d have become just another casualty along the wayside. But there’s no denying a lot of people buying their records also buy Faithless albums to play while they read a paperback book if there’s nothing on TV on a Tuesday night.
The Chemical Brothers have never lacked the pull to get whomever the zeitgeist is in to a studio to add a veneer to their current work. So it’s little surprise that Klaxons make an appearance (being the only nu-rave act likely to survive the day-glo implosion that is surely only minutes away). ‘All Rights Reversed’ is what Franciscan Monks will chant when the human race is fully spacebourne and facing down species-extinction. But its lacking the tangibility of past team-ups – there’s no sense that it’s anything more than…just another track. To skip through if you’re not in mood – could you imagine saying the same about ‘Setting Sun’?
And as much as Fat Lip’s appearance on ‘The Salmon Dance’ is an interesting little distraction, it’s an at-odds interlude to the rest of the record. The drowsy rhymes and helium-warped synths seem out of place amongst the thin-air light-headed altitude that so many of the other tracks float at.
With the purely instrumental tracks the Brothers shine. ‘Burst Generator’ has drum fills that sound like they were lifted whole from the introduction of some gratuitously plastic 1980s gameshow, but somehow re-worked to include soaring jet engine flybys and wide-eyed euphoric gleam. ‘Saturate’ has matched some frenetic breaks with some sparse beats, which builds to a series of ever-growing sonic peaks.
