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Thursday, Jul 9, 2009
The dot-coms went bust, but the Chemical Brothers are still office-partying like it's 1999.
Jan 29, 2002 | It's hard to imagine a worse time for the release of the Chemical Brothers' new record, "Come With Us," than this January. Along with bombastic peers Fatboy Slim, the Prodigy, Daft Punk and, most recently, Basement Jaxx, the Chemical Brothers graced the 1990s with some of the most cutting-edge office-party music the world has ever known. In 2002, though, there are far fewer cutting-edge offices, and those still toiling in them don't feel much like partying. On this, their fourth album, the English duo of Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons return to their euphoric hands-in-the-air techno roots after the pastoral psychedelic pop of their last record, "Surrender." It's excellently crafted, grandiose and rousing, and right now, it sounds ridiculous.
Techno music, which began as the dystopian dream of Detroit kids living amid the rubble of a dead industrial era, morphed in the last decade into the soundtrack of a thousand fast companies dreaming of big-pop IPOs. It was the ubiquitous backbeat of the frenetic years when corporations bought up the dregs of bohemia, cloaked themselves in street cred and went hurling heedlessly toward an imagined future of endless opportunity, progress, speed and money. Those years are over now, that future revealed as a mirage. So where does that leave the music?
For now, in a weird limbo. Commercially, the mid-to-late-'90s conceit that electronic music would wrest the airwaves from guitar rock dinosaurs has proved as fanciful as the idea that online video rental could be a billion-dollar business. Artistically, mainstream producers are going to have to find a way to make their jubilant, triumphant dance music relevant in subdued, precarious times.
A few years ago, insouciant acts like Daft Punk and later Basement Jaxx released warm, funky, exultant records that were just right for nightclubs and high-tech launch parties packed with gamines in $300 shoes sloshing day-glo cocktails. Both debuts (for Basement Jaxx, a collection of singles) were shot through with a giddy enthusiasm that spilled over into their reception. I thought they would be stars, and I wasn't alone.
In 2001, both acts released new albums, and no one seemed to notice. In Daft Punk's case, their record "Discovery" came off like a parody of the French house craze they helped create. Basement Jaxx's "Rooty" was largely ignored by a public exhausted by the volcano of hype that accompanied their last effort, "Remedy." The two most talked-about bands of the year, the Strokes and the White Stripes, were old-fashioned rock bands of the sort that DJs were supposed to displace. And all that was before Sept. 11.
It's brave of the Chemical Brothers to release a celebratory new record into a somber new world, to try to revive megaclub-style block-rocking beats at a time when a lot of people are cocooned at home. But they can't pull it off. There are a few really good tracks on "Come With Us" -- in fact, the Chemicals succeed whenever they depart from the kind of bellicose party music they made famous. The duo isn't washed up, but the genre they pioneered and the era it defined certainly is.
Walking around downtown Manhattan with "Come With Us" on my Walkman was an exercise in cognitive dissonance. On the eponymous opening track, the frenetic, suspenseful strings and ascending beats all built to a cathartic climax, exploding in squelching waves of sound seemingly made to unleash dance floor frenzy. Yet in the listless streets lined with shops offering desperate going-out-of-business sales, the music felt as inappropriate as Richard Strauss's "Thus Spake Zarathustra" would in a shrink's waiting room. "Come With Us" begins by referencing the kind of lost-in-space sci-fi cinematic kitsch that dominated the early rave scene -- a gesture that might seem charmingly retro in, say, 2010 but that for now is just tired. Similarly, the pulsing intensity of "It Began In Afrika" -- more a tribute to Afrika Bambaataa's futuristic electro than to African percussion and polyrhythms -- comes off as embarrassingly dated. Two years ago, it was achingly trendy to reference the early '80s futurism of the Bronx-based pioneer. Today, it bespeaks a lack of new ideas. Other songs are fine but generic: I'd certainly dance to the spare, funk-tinged "Denmark" if I heard it at a club, but I'd just as certainly forget it the next day.
