Chemical Brothers s/d

This just in:

Following their fifth consecutive number 1 album last year, the Grammy award winning ‘We Are The Night’, The Chemical Brothers return with ‘Brotherhood’ a best of collection with a kick and a twist, set for release on 1st September 2008.

In a career that to date has spanned 13 years and accrued 9 million record sales Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons have established themselves as true pioneers of electronic music and as The Chemical Brothers they have become one of the most popular dance acts of all time. Now seems the perfect time to take stock of their seminal output with the double disc celebration that is Brotherhood.

Brotherhood comprises of 2 discs, the first is a collection of 14 undeniable benchmark Singles from the bands immense back catalogue and new track ‘Keep My Composure’ which features the shimmering flow of Baltimore’s Spank Rock.

The 2nd will feature exclusively Electronic Battle Weapons 1-10. Since 1996 Electronic Battle Weapons have acted as the laboratories for The Chems devious musical experiments and laid the rhythmic and melodic foundations for numerous tracks as well as providing some of the duos most formidable mixes. Until now Electronic Battle Weapons1-9 have only been available on various limited formats and this is the first time they have been widely available.

Brotherhood will be preceded by the digital download single Midnight Madness. Derived and developed from Electronic Battle Weapons 10 Midnight Madness is The Chemical Brothers at there most infectious, euphoric, report to the dancefloor best.

Midnight Madness is released on the 18th August.
Brotherhood is released on 1st September both on Freestyle Dust/Virgin Records

TRACKLISTING

DISC 1

1. Galvanize
2. Hey Boy Hey Girl
3. Block Rockin’ Beats
4. Do It Again
5. Believe
6. Star Guitar
7. Let Forever Be
8. Leave Home
9. Keep My Composure
10. Saturate
11. Out Of Control
12. Midnight Madness
13. The Golden Path
14. Setting Sun
15. Chemical Beats

DISC 2
1-10 Electronic Battle Weapons

compare with the last best-of, which came out in 2004:

1. Song To The Siren
2. Chemical Beats
3. Leave Home
4. Setting Sun
5. Block Rockin' Beats
6. Private Psychedelic Reel
7. Hey Boy Hey Girl
8. Let Forever Be
9. Out Of Control
10. Star Guitar
11. Test
12. Get Yourself High - Chemical Brothers & K-Os
13. Golden Path - Chemical Brothers & The Flaming Lips

EBWs
It Doesn't Matter
Don't Stop The Rock
Under The Influence
Freak Of The Week
It Began In Afrika
Hoops
Galvanize
Saturate
ebw9 = ?
ebw10 = ?

According to the press release, ebw10 = Midnight Madness.

#7 was Acid Children, not Gavanise

press release sez Midnight Madness is not #10 but is based on it

(and EBW6 was a remix after the fact, not a trial early version like most of the others)

i heard EBW6 way before Hoops. got info re 7 from discogs tho.

"shimmering flow of Baltimore’s Spank Rock."

Shimmering?

babbling brook more like

.

other than the limited teaser extra cd, i just dont see who this is aimed at.
surely, any casual fans already have the current 'best of' collection, especially seeing as the cd is stocked at bargain basement prices.
truly baffling.

yeah, in Australia the current in-print version is the best-of, the bonus disc from the first release, AND the DVD best-of, all in a three-part gatefold DVD-sized box... in a slipcase... for under twenty bucks.

end of contract I guess?

are the EBWs diff't versions of these tracks??

they tended to be dancier mixes of what you'd later hear on the albums

new single was on C4 last night. it's pretty dire imo - sounds like what some euro trance-lite dude would come up with.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=xcHF_RhSW-0

i think ebw 10 is the best song of the year so far... it's so incredibly happy.

midnight midnight MIDNIGHT

I don't have the second disk but the Spank Rock track rules.

'come with us' is a pretty dope album imo

i even like this corny ass shit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDe6MZQjpho

should we do an "electronic battle weapons" poll???

we should!

Needs YouTube links, I keep forgetting which is which.

deej OTM

Surprised there was no bump for Further (one of their best IMO)

Anyone heard the soundtrack they did for "Hanna"?

I've only heard pieces of it but so far it seems to be way better than the stuff Daft Punk churned out for "Tron Legacy"...

Chemical Brothers - Further (June 2010)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwZOid42f2g

Olympic velodrome theme:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/jul/17/london-2012-chemical-brothers

I approve of this musics

wow:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BC2dRkm8ATU

had a hard time watching that

pretty cool though

theyre back

its like 1999 all over again

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTBNONSR9F8

theyre back

a long, fallow two months since their last video :D

its like 1999 all over again

otm though, but feels like it fades out halfway through

and another, probably my favorite of the three. once again the video is fantastic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSYwtllbweY

everything I've heard from this sounds like it could've slotted in between Surrender and Come With Us. Even the cover art looks like a real throwback to their early days

I’m a fan of pretty much the entire Chems career arc, up to and including Born In The Echoes, but I find it hard to argue that these new tracks aren’t a step up compared to their recent work & that the album in April probably will be as well
(The live version of “Free Yourself” is better tho)

Also fun fact the No Geography cover is lifted wholesale from the insert art of the first Godley & Creme album (which in all likelihood won’t keep it from being one of my favorites of 2019 come the end of the year):
https://www.discogs.com/release/871182-Consequences/images

Chems good up to Dig Your Own Hole. Couple of singles replicated and slightly altered their formula with decent results, but if they had only made their first two albums and then quit, they'd be considered just as good.

admittedly Dig holds up a lot better than I thought it would. but I still think they made the right choice going where they did - the fact that their new singles are racking up millions of views is pretty impressive. personally I'm with Champ, I kinda like everything they've ever done to some degree, even the clunkier albums like We Are the Night or Born in the Echoes are pretty fun. In my mind Further is their best album but I'm guessing that one didn't sell quite like their others.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRfSM-lv55I

this is probably one of the best music videos I've ever seen

It's not even one of the best chemical brothers videos! Got to Keep on is better, could stand to be even weirder. Neither are a patch on Star Guitar or Let Forever Be. As for the songs, zzzzz.

sorry I'm a sucker for dog-centric videos

I will admit to tearing up a bit at the part where they’re sending the dog into space as his handler proudly watches, even though I hadn’t really been paying attention to the screen up to that point. Guess that’s the hallmark of a good video? Maybe?
As for the song, I can kind of imagine it being demoted to the “cameos from the slower, more breakbeat-y parts of our discography” segue in their live sets by the next tour cycle, if it even makes it that far, but the soul sample is well-selected and well-incorporated and the Aurora vocals are excellent (which bodes well since she’s supposed to be on a fair amount of this album).

Besides all arguments about video accompaniments to Chems music have been moot since around 2007 when the Smith + Lyall live visuals became the definitive pairing for whatever they were putting out

interesting that nearly all the singles released are from the second half of the album

Some version of the opener, “Eve Of Destruction”, has been done for awhile, as evidenced by its presence as a vocal snippet (complete with visuals) in the setlist last summer w/ all the No Geography tracks that have come out by now, plus this recording from a DJ set a bit before the tour started:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/110uhJIYNjsTSLqb8tOp1SzfL3C2V6o3x/view

So yeah, it seems weird to me that we’ve gotten a track that wasn’t previewed at all (apart from a short cameo in a bbc mix) before “Eve Of Destruction”. Maybe it’s gonna be their “big single” (heavy airquotes for a Chemical Brothers song coming out in 2019) to coincide with the album rollout?

Played "Got To Keep On" at a party last weekend, it went down a storm!

just put on Don't Think, their live CD/DVD from the Further era. I'd forgotten how good this was - like Everything, Everything or Alive 2007, it's basically a continuous mix of their best stuff. I didn't really see it get much fanfare but it's incredible.

The concert film is especially a treat - not that 2007 Daft Punk or 1999 Underworld didn’t have brilliant live visuals, but Adam Smith just ties everything good about what a Chemical Brothers show meant by 2011, both in terms of their music and his visual accompaniment, into such a neat little package, with the focus on the audience being a satisfying extra twist on the format.
The only thing that lets it down for me is that it comes from a festival gig, and therefore doesn’t have one of the best encores they’ve ever assembled on top of the already-strong setlist:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q604uTA9vPI

Alright so the record’s out and I’m impressed by it, albeit in kind of a different way that I was expecting. It’s a very emotive album - really gives off the sense, more than usual, that Tom Rowlands is FEELING EMOTIONS and using the venue of The Chemical Brothers to express them. The sequencing is a pleasantly headlong rush. The Aurora tracks are pretty uniformly the highlights of the stuff that didn’t come out beforehand, tho the title track is also very strong.

Album is surprisingly fun. It's like the uptempo parts of 'Since I Left You' crossed with Orbital's Wonky'.

And yeah I'm hearing "Got To Keep On" at basically every party/club I go to, which maybe says something about those parties/clubs.

Sick remix too - and new to me!

the more you hear re weatherall, the more you love him.

my YouTube algorithm has been playing a bunch of Chemical Brothers videos lately which rules. so many of these I haven't seen in years. I remember seeing "Get Yourself High" on MTV and being all OH MY GOD HOW DID THEY DO THIS

lol haven't seen that before, pretty good. any other recs?

"Let Forever Be" is the one directed by Gondry and is probably one of my favorite music videos ever. Mostly for personal reasons. I just turned 13 and was way into the Chemical Bros, so I'd flip on MTV every day after school trying to catch the video. I had no idea what it sounded like. One day I finally caught it and not only was the song great but the video was freaky as hell, unlike anything I'd seen before. I remember really struggling to describe it to a friend. Sadly it never came on again. You can see it now on YouTube, of course.

imo the brilliance of it is that they actually made the woman do each sequence 7 times, each time slightly different (maybe not on purpose), so its kind of out of sync like a high school musical. I'm sure this was how Gondry wanted it of course.

fwiw all their videos are great, they're all pretty elaborate and most of them are funny. shout out to "Star Guitar" though, I was like a minute in before realizing it was actually perfectly synced to the music, again I'm not sure how they pulled this off in 2002

Oh yeah i know those (and they're awesome), I should have specified deeper cuts! I'll just have a trawl. I don't know how star guitar was done either, get yourself high is also very impressive for its era.

I became a major fan in '06 so the first video I really got to enjoy being released was "Do It Again", which was on MTV Dance and similar channels every hour or so, and I liked that the motivation behind it was seemingly nothing except to redo "Ya Mama" with a happier ending

In the unlikely event I get asked to do ‘My Cultural Life’, I’d pick Chemical Brothers videos. Just perfect synthesis of music, visuals and dance.

"Let Forever Be" is the one directed by Gondry

Gondry did at least four, including Star Guitar! Most of their videos in the last 20 years have either been by Adam Smith (their live visuals guy, who even took over onstage when Ed went back to uni) with Marcus Lyall, or Dom & Nic, who’ve also been working with them since the 90s

well that one's the most Gondry of the Gondries

lol haven't seen that before, pretty good. any other recs?

Wide Open live is something else:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYqyaHxdgW4

their stage show looks incredibly sick, now that I've seen Underworld they might be the act I wanna see most

It is. Saw them at Leeds and there’s a bit in MAH where the mad as hell dude works himself into a frenzy and fires lasers into the crowd. So exciting I nearly peed myself!

Not sure if it counts as a deep cut, but 'Wide Open' is great

doesn't quite have the gondry magic but cool idea & very well done.

Tomora tell us about the world of ‘Come Closer’: “The album is about the search for some connection”
Watch Aurora and The Chemical Brothers' Tom Rowlands talk to NME about what brought them together, humanity, activism, and dealing in the "exceptional" to create "a mix of escapism and confrontation" on their debut album
https://www.nme.com/features/music-interviews/tomora-aurora-chemical-brothers-tom-rowlands-interview-come-closer-coachella-live-3927696

Tomora release ‘Come Closer’ on April 17 via Fontana

fun interview, had no idea this was happening, sounds like it'll be a blast. after No Geography I kinda wondered if they'd go ahead and make her a full time member...her influence on that album seems to go a lot further than the other guest stars they've had