Listened for the first time.
This is a sacred experience, of course. After some small amount of indecision about how to do so, I finally settled on a quiet hour to open the windows of my room and lie back on a futon with the music right in my ears. This was the right way.
Hands down. This is their most cohesive album yet. Tracks 1-9, at least. It's phenomenally sequenced, in key, in mood, in energy. Tracks 1-6 form a perfectly packaged two-sided experience that begins and ends on an acapella loop. A sequence that could end perfectly there, happily as an EP, if not for The Universe Sent Me transitioning PERFECTLY into We've Got To Try - which delivers you upon a 1-2-3 punch of increasingly demented bangers. This album is un-Chemical too, it treads new ground, but in a way Born in the Echoes didn't, it's a natural extension of the mad space wizard's explorations into unexplored quadrants. It's like hearing them "cover" one of their DJ sets - there's a reliance on samples here different than anything they've done before.
Even more than Further, I want to hear this live in full in sequence. Deadly serious. I'm scared shitless too many songs get left off this album in favor of classics this 2019 tour. I need to hear so much of this.
Eve of Destruction > Bango is an inseparable sequence better than any two songs they've mixed together in the past. Eve of Destruction leads you on a disco Tokyo journey under neon lights, electrical wires crisscrossing an alleyway, taxi-dodging from disco to disco to strobe to strobe to DJ to DJ, electro drum beat patterns smacking through the mix like their old DJ cutups. There's a vocal there, a local guide, to guide you by hand through every inverting dizzying passage. Bango takes this vibe and jams upon, like you've finally found the club you want to spend the night and immediately get into a fight with every nasty fucker in it - and every punch you launch is landing. The club watches in rapt awe as you vanquish evil throwing shapes in your shades and leather jacket. Aurora's vocals lend a top-of-the-mountain spirituality to the engagements, to you, cool king of the dancefloor, holding court.
Every 16 bar passage raises the energy, culminating not in something that ups the energy, but ups the euphoria into the LSD 80s dream crash that is No Geography - it's no disappointment, it's the celebration of your mad experiences, a reward for braving the unknown. It calls to mind Thieves Like Us, and the percussive smashing of all those drum machine heavy 12" Extended Mixes put out, prismed through Tom and Ed's musical light filter. Want something harder? You'll get it later...
I'd love to hear it continue after the last build, but liquid disco Got To Keep On takes its place, its alien choirs in group jams on the dancefloor, ringing out ritual celebrations. It evokes daily life lifted by previous wonderful experiences, working towards the next. John Peel described "Teenage Kicks" as perfect, and elaborated "There's nothing you could add to it or subtract from it that would improve it." There's a glorious minimalism to Got To Keep On that makes me think of this. Every single thing in this song is in its right place, its minimalism is macro-exact and lush. I still can't get over the melodies that soar over the stripped down crowd breakdown.
Gravity Drops, black holes in a warehouse, takes serves the same sort of purpose as Orange Wedge or Lost in the K-Hole, and is probably the most "b-sidey" of all the tracks here, but has every place on this album in the role of the "lowkey" bridge, the nothing-quite-like-it middle track that excited bizarre sounds in your mind. The synth lines and drum patterns are delightfully naive, they sound like something I could write - then are upended by the mid-song snare roll into the bizarre, inverted, upside-down tonenoise beat shuffle breakdown. The outro evokes their old school sample manipulations, especially the Everything Must Go remix intro. It's an aptly titled vital song. one that breaks the train tracks and redefines the mood properly to set up...
The Universe Sent Me, tear wrenching. It evokes something of the mood of Wide Open and sets it on fire, slow motion red energy dancing in void, scorches it, tossed in ballistic light. It's the sound of going one step beyond, losing your mind in painful ecstacy, pulling something too powerful inside, feeling it take over you, and needing to let it out and run, beams shooting from the fingertips, bellowing. It hurts and it's gorgeous, it's catharsis.
"I cave in", like I just said, could book end a theoretical EP if it didn't lead into We've Got To Try so majestically, which sets up a final trilogy of songs. We've Got To Try is silly and still there's nothing like it - I fear seeing the music video has ruined this song for me, but it's still magic on its own somehow, crunk and funky and soulful. I love the way the vocal line is reinterpreted each time with new harmonies. It's un-Chemical too - there are moments where you expect some mad modular sound in the sampled sections, but these parts simply play in all their soulful well-produced re-produced glory, with nothing but a distorted dub echo at times. It's so cool in its trade back and forth between the heart and the mechanic.
Then full mechanic in Free Yourself, a song elevated by its position in the album. This one's grown on me greatly, the way each chorus builds to something different is novel, and the b-boy midsection doesn't feel as tame as it did on the first listens. It's as though, in all the wild eclecticism of Eve of Descruction and Bango which set the mood and jockeyed through so many great voices, this, We've Got To Try, and the following track narrow in on those specific mentioned vibes and deliver them to their fullest.
And MAH just takes you one more higher, madder, angier, demented, distorted, off-beat smashing level, that leaves you exhausted and wilded out knowing you've reached the peak promised from the very start. The intro comes perfectly out of Free Yourself, perfectly - and the throaty boom bass made me laugh before I even heard the laughing samples join in with me. This song is just so, fucking, Chemical Brothers. I'd only love it more if they'd held no punches back and put the whole EBW monty on the album - but then the intro out of Free Yourself would be sacrificed, and maybe a few listeners would be lost in the process, carried away by the masked mad shirtless man who just won't take it anymore. No, the problem is I need that section that drops at 2:05 in my life AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE. The single version ends up being different, as the album version (the version used in the BBC Radio shows) ends on a rolling slowing synth, spinning out exhausted into the album's conclusion.
Sometimes hearing music is like seeing something through a cloud of black smoke. You aren't sure what the song truly is yet as it's bigger than you can comprehend and still too far away to touch. Catch Me I'm Falling, is like this. It's not an easy ender and it's not what was expected. The outro synth is so surprisingly gorgeous. But I can't say a thing about it because I don't know this song yet. It speaks a different language. Its synths cut you open, sensual and longing. Tracks 1-9 ask for an ending unlike the journey, and this delivers, but it far from feels like the safe, warm, happy comedown desired after the swirling foreign stratosphere highs just experienced. Don't think I don't like it. I just don't know it yet. And far from speculate about what could be better here (another 3 song sequence of chilled out, more earthy tracks?) - I want to sit down and understand you.
I love this work. I call it a work as I can't even compare it to any album they've released before. But it's so good. So good so good so good. So vital, instinctive, glued together. I'm a fan of its bigger picture, and maybe that's all I can say about it - as a package No Geography is a winner bigger than the sum of its parts, and opens a window into a universe you never saw coming. Like every Chems album (but BITE) has done for me before, and hallelujah for that.
I still remember the release of Further as one of the "biggest" moments of my young teenage years. I was so excited for it - and the build up for months just felt IMMENSE. It's 9 years later (what the fuck) and a great amount of work and school and projects and my radio station and future employment and being married and emails and stress and responsibilities and bills and remembering things and failing things and trudging through horrible moments in life later... this release just felt like it had no momentum. I never had the time to push a big update to the forum, singles were just "released" here and there on Spotify. The ceremony of discovery and anticipation washed away by the modern world and my growing adulthood in it.
Yet sitting back on the couch, windows open, listening to the whole thing on a good pair of headphones with no one and nothing to interrupt me, for just part of an hour... the magic came back. It never really went anywhere. It's just so good to find it again. When you're without it it feels like forever.
Here's to all the good listens to come!!
P.S. - you know how New Order had a Complete Music companion to Music Complete? With 12" extended versions of all the album tracks. Yeah. Do that. Do that for this. I want that for this. These songs come together great, but I can't help feel like they've got even more to say by themselves.
Never for money, always for love.
