If you view pop music as a perpetual war between the Oceania, Eurasia and East Asia of guitars, dance music and hip-hop/R&B, it might appear as though dance music has won. Out there it’s all rave builds and Alton Towers bass drops, house revivals and wall-to-wall superstar DJs. Even the frat boys of the US, who for years viewed electronic music as some decadent European affectation for ambisexuals, have now succumbed to EDM.
Into this fray step the Chemical Brothers, 90s dance music titans, with their eighth studio album, their most enjoyable in years. By today’s standards – that’s brostep, Rihanna feat. Calvin Harris, Tiësto – it sounds archaic, but intentionally so. There are tracks here that still skew towards song-craft rather than the dynamics tailored to today’s attention-deficit-disordered raver. The sinister and mutating EML Ritual celebrates the semi-hobbyist makers of antique synthesizers, the long-defunct Electronic Music Laboratories. Among its intriguing noises is an acrylic skid that slides all over the beat, half DJ scratch, half analogue yelp. Taste of Honey may have a dud vocal that rhymes “honey” with “money”, but it has a terrific stereo pan of a giant bee, and a surprise guitar solo, of sorts, which sounds like Jimi Hendrix warming up.
Related: The Chemical Brothers: ‘We’ve been together longer than a lot of marriages’
Continue reading...by Kitty Empire via Electronic music | The Guardian
No comments:
Post a Comment