Chemical Brothers - Dig Your Own POLL*

Oh god, also HO HO HOPE Sandoval is on this record. A lot to hate.

Maybe "A Modern Midnight Conversation" as well.

i first heard 'Out Of Control' while on a train to Bristol en route to my first Glastonbury where the album was getting predictably rinsed all over the sun-drenched site from various stalls and tents so imo it remains totally fucking great

I am probably unhealthily obsessed with "Battle Scars".

yes

Hey you know what, Music: response isn't actually that bad. I really like the Sonic Boom VCS3 synth wubs it starts with.

Hmm, Surrender v DYOH is a tricky one. PPR > Dream On, but Let Forever Be > Setting Sun (even though I find "how does it feel like" to be irritatingly ungrammatical").

it's supposed to be "how does it feel, like...", scouser style

Hooray you have transformed it for me!

I'll vote for the obvious choice: "Setting Sun." Blew my mind.

As for Surrender, "Out of Control" and "Hey Boy: Hey Girl" compensate for Hope Sandoval and Mercury Fucking Rev.

Actually, in terms of the *music*, I'm liking it (Surrender) a lot more than I did at the time. Though barney's off key singing still bugs the heck out of me.

(I did hear a rumour that there was originally more backing that he was supposedly singing along with, and that they took it out in the mix to make it more minimal and Moroder, with the effect that his vocal riff no longer makes any sense at all.)

I think perhaps I judged it a bit too harshly because its release coincided with one of the most rabidly rockist periods of my life.

I really like "Where Do I Begin" ...

― I want sprinkles (country matters), Monday, 23 February 2009 16:48 (50 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Oh yeah, Beth Orton, innit?

surrender is epic

Sumner's guitar on "Out of Control" = some of his wildest.

It really falls down in the middle. There's a lot of skippable flab starting around the time Noel Gallagher opens his mouth and I keep waiting for it to pick back up again, and it doesn't.

haha oh yeah, I also wildly hated "Let Forever Be"

I recently went through a bout of relistening to all the albums (yay finally ripping all my collection at last) and I was most surprised how what I thought was a fairly standard formula for them over the years actually had more variety than I realized -- it's less obvious at points than, say, Basement Jaxx's twists and turns, but they managed the trick of 'we have our sound but we know what else is out there' pretty nicely.

I got through Let Forever Be, but I really reached for the skip button when it got to Asleep From Day. KILL KILL KILL KILL.

OK, Got Glint? just kicked in and I feel better.

So sorry to litter DYOH thread with Surrender gubbins. I was just curious about how I could love an album so much I wore holes in it, and dislike the follow up so much as to never investigate them again.

Just listening to Where Do I Begin and I don't remember the ending at all! I probably used to skip it 'cause of Beth Ort-yawn.

Not on this album, but "The Sunshine Underground" in dire need of more love

My Chems top 5:

1) Burst Generator (HAHAHAHAHA)
2) Elektrobank
3) TPPR
4) The Sunshine Underground
5) We Are The Night

btw "Star Guitar", along with the album it's on, is boring dreck, and the ILM love it gets is totally mystifying

well that's wrong, for sure, it's a fine track.

lol i haven't heard two of your choices. haven't been loving the chemical brothers since come with us, or even surrender really.

Like I say, "We Are The Night" is criminally underrated, to the point where it came comfortably within RYM's top 1000 lowest-rated albums ever. Worth it for those two songs alone, but there's more there to like.

doesn't ... matter. It
doesn't ... matter. It
doesn't ... matter. It
doesn't ... matter. It
doesn't ... matter. It

btw "Star Guitar", along with the album it's on, is boring dreck, and the ILM love it gets is totally mystifying

^^^^^^^^^^^ this

"Elektrobank" by a million miles. (And this is a good album, but "Electrobank" is like 73 types of good).

I'm going to say Get Up On It Like This is probably my favourite on this album, just to be a bit contrary.

Surrender is half a good album. I remember loving the singles, Music: Response, The Sunshine Underground (WAY better than TPPR), and Out Of Control (precursor to Shoot Speed / Kill Light) an awful lot. They never really held my interest for too long after that, though; too many singles with rent-a-vocalists as the USP rather than, you know, awesome fucking beats and hooks.

Out Of Control and The Sunshine Underground might be my favourite Chemical Brothers tracks, looking back, and the singles are awesome but the album at the whole as too many weak tracks on it.

I saw them play a festival in Portugal last year and they were totally acid and incredible, better than they've been for at least ten years. That said, a compilation of their Electronic Battle Weapon series would be better than any individual Chems album.

a compilation of their Electronic Battle Weapon series would be better than any individual Chems album.

i think they did this as a bonus disc on their most recent best-of.

It's funny, I voted for TPPR by instinct, as it was my fave when the album came out. But I went back and listened to it again, and realised that these days, it's not even close. Can I change my vote? I used to like the more traditional "rock" songs with guests on them, but now I tend towards the pure banging electro noise.

I BLAME ED'S BANGIN' SPEAKERS FOR RUINING MY MUSICAL TASTES!!!

Now I want to vote for Electrobank I think.

Got to vote for 'Elektrobank', still remember hearing it for the first time on a Radio 1 broadcast of a gig in late '96/early '97 - when it got to the end section I almost jumped out my seat (I was doing some homework at the time), looking back it was probably the first time anything had sounded properly psychedelic to me.

This is easily their best album - I gave up on them after Push The Button and only a couple of songs on Surrender did it for me last time I listened to it.

That said, a compilation of their Electronic Battle Weapon series would be better than any individual Chems album.

this was a bonus disc with their Brotherhood comp last year

Sofia workin it

This is my least favourite album by them, although I've never heard Push the Button. Despite their status as one of the handful of albums-based dance acts of that era, I think their singles and (particularly) remixes are much better. Surrender is pretty much the only one that works as an album, I think.

I don't even like the singles off DYOH one much! Will have to listen again before I vote.

Setting Sun is just awful. They'd been doing this mad live mix of Chemical Beats and Tomorrow Never Knows that it kind of grew out of, I think, but it really doesn't get close to how great that was.

I still remember hearing TPPR for the first time on a promo cassette and dragging myself down to the Heavenly Social with flu because I knew they'd play it out that night. Ended up having to go home in pieces before they even came on. But that was their first and best psychedelic wig-out - the wretched The Test proves that it's not that easy to pull off. I like the way that they used the soon-to-be-obligatory indie guest star to add weird hooks and textures rather than vocals, something I don't think they ever did again. Elektrobank a close second (mainly for the last two minutes blending into Piku), and Setting Sun is still probably the weirdest, heaviest UK number one ever.

A friend and I had a theory at the time that the album followed the progress of a night out: first the big beat good times, then a darker turn with Setting Sun and the acid bangers, then the wracked comedown of Where Do I Begin? and finally the cathartic recovery of TPPR. Quite where Get Up On It Like This fits in I'm not sure but I still hear the album that way. It's such a brilliantly dense, noisy record, with just this one shining moment of clouds-parting lushness at the end. I'm a big fan generally but they've never structured a record so well since.

Setting Sun is still probably the weirdest, heaviest UK number one ever

in many ways the Mouldy Old Dough of the 90s

Dorian's OTM here - what's so great about Dig Your Own Hole (and Exit Planet Dust, and by extension Orbital's Brown album) is that they helped define an approach to how a dance album should work, ie like a DJ set.

It's a shame they kind of redefined it afterwards in a less interesting way, from Surrender on (lets get loads of vocalists in and make it more like a classic rock album) in a way that had a pretty detrimental influence on dozens of albums from then on in. This is their last really coherent record (they've essentially been remaking Surrender for ten years now).

Agreed re; sequencing. That's what was so key, and what's been lost.

Elektrobank. The trouble with blok rockin beats is the source (23 skidoo) is so much better. If I knew the original of the elektrobank sample i might think that too.

Why do people have such a problem listening to dance music in a conventional album structure? It doesn't have to sound more like a mix to be coherent. Surrender, Come With Us and Push The Button all have roughly the same level of quality altho they did become predictable after Surrender true.

It's not the conventional album structure that's the issue, it's that they're all over the place and feel like compilations. I don't like the Justice album much but that's a conventional album structure and no one can accuse that of lacking coherence.

I am being totally rockist about this incidentally but I'm not sure I want to listen to another dance record with six different guest vocalists on it ever again.

too much posse

I am trying to pretend that the first three Basement Jaxx albums don't exist here, but they were coming from a very different place to the Chems.

the chems positioned this as 'the sgt pepper of big beat' for real, their whole thing was, why *not* structure it well? if that's rockist i don't want to be the other thing.

if those six vocalists were all singing on good tracks it'd be fine, but that's never been the case. i do agree with the crticism of this approach in that it became cliched and was often the band (whoever was doing it) trying something half-baked rather than sticking to what they do best.

Jaxx LPs are similar in some ways tho - every album has to end with some chilled out end-of-night/early-morning re-adjustment

I think most rock albums are sequenced pretty fucking badly anyway.

I've never been to DJ sets or nightclubs really anyway; the great thing about Brown or DYOH or whatever is that it transported me somewhere, not that it "mimicked a DJ set". If Coldplay could sequence an album properly rather than just dumping their songs together, they'd be dangerous.

I too am an unashamed fan of album sequencing, we're a dying breed :(

Album sequencing is the job of a good-eared producer, rather than your usual idiot musician. So it would make sense that Chemical Brothers paid attention to it. Bad sequencing can ruin a good album for me. (Can't remember which Sloan album it was that suffered from this, but it killed it for me until I was able to rip the tracks and resequence them.)

Maybe you're on to something that this is something that does come from a dance music perspective - sequencing being more the thing of a DJ... but that's not entirely true. I can remember from being in live bands, really working out what setlists worked best, to grab people with a a good hook, while at the same time gradually building the speed and the mood. It's tough, and it is different in a live setting than it is on an album.

I mean, the best sequenced album of the past year that I've heard is the LOTP album (yeah, them again) and they have pretty much said that was down to Alkan treating the album as a mixed-up DJ set rather than a standard "classic rock album."

I mean, the first album I ever heard that did that, really, was Screamadelica (yeah, yeah, laugh if you like, but I got it out again recently, and it made me not quite so ashamed of my former Scream obsession.)

DYOH really does have that kind of progression that makes it *feel* like a journey. Because, as a recovering rockist, that's how I tend to listen to dance music - in an album setting. At home. And DYOH worked as an album, as a complete whole - where Surrender was a couple of singles, a couple of guest spots and not so well strung together.

Also, DYOH had a lot of long, droney psychedelic pieces that really work... as DRONEROCK as well as dance music.

I think it really is telling, who approaches this kind of music coming out of a club setting, and approaches it out of a listening in your bedroom setting.

I mean, the best sequenced album of the past year that I've heard is the LOTP album (yeah, them again) and they have pretty much said that was down to Alkan treating the album as a mixed-up DJ set rather than a standard "classic rock album."

word to all of this

him

rediscovered my love for this and EPD by adding them to my workout playlist. they always deliver too.

This has always been a favorite of mine. From start to finish it is damn solid and the last 2 tracks create a hugely epic ending. I'd probably vote for Elektrobank.

I was recently stoked to discover Got Glint off of Surrender heavily sampled Bernard Fevre. I was recently listening to Cosmos 2043 and Earth Message was essentially a stripped down version of the song. Fun times.

RE: Surrender (upthread), I remember liking it quite a lot at the time of its release, even if (or because?) it was different from the (studio) albums that proceeded it: https://web.archive.org/web/20010112123300/http://www.skinny.com/music/reviews/1999/06/html/chemicalbros2.html

I heard Surrender as the crossover hybrid that appealed to Friends of Tim F; its more accessible aesthetics as a set list complement to the to roughest moments of Exit and Dig. (Fwiw, my friends and I were in our mid-20's.)

I always forget how aggressive and just loud "Setting Sun" is.

When I was 17 it sounded very dangerous and intense and sexy and it still kind of does.

I also remember Where Do I Begin completely blowing my mind at the time, the idea of a "singer songwriter" doing a looped, four-line, wistful poem over a druggy backwards guitar sample and then going into a massive breakbeat. My god that sounds terrible when I write it out but it's sooooo good.

25 years... Time can be scary sometimes.

all the alt mixes on the reissue are really good. Especially the one of it doesn't matter. Listen to that one with some good headphones and you'll have a good time.

Might have to pick it up, I bought the original LP back in the day without a way to play it and when I finally got a turntable I found out I got two of the first record

Surprisingly this record actually sorta holds up

Yeah, it slaps.

Perfect album that changed my life when I was 9

"sorta"?????????