CD Feature/ Chemical Brothers: "Brotherhood"

Cautionary verbage, including words from up-and-comer Deadmau5 in a recent DJ Mag article, is springing up all over the place predicting that the end of the superstar DJ/engineer era is at hand.

Karma’s being stubborn on this one, though – too many glorified record collectors with advanced expertise in canned software programs are making buckets of money for nothing and getting their chicks for free without ever having to learn an instrument. Much (much) worse, a fat wallet has replaced hard-wired coolness as the signifying characteristic of the dance fan, giving rise to a whole flock of vultures waiting in the media wings to wipe all knob-twiddlers from the face of the earth.

But let us spare Chemical Tom and Ed. Although their oeuvre has taken some missteps, this best-of is historic, divulging their true nature as a 2-man League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, innovators in the esoteric field of hip-hop-born, big-beat wind-up gadgets too cool for the gangster crowd. “Galvanize” (the Bud commercial thing with Q-Tip on raps) and “Block Rockin’ Beats” (even you know this one) are here because they have to be, as are the better entries from last year’s We Are the Night, but former US #1 dance hit "It Began in Afrika," strangely enough, isn’t.

“Salmon Dance,” the Chemical Brothers equivalent of McCain picking a hockey mom for VP, isn’t either, but that makes a lot of sense, seeing as how this thing is party-central in a jewel case, big, loud, uplifting and stupid at the same time.

By Eric Saeger

Homepage: Chemical Brothers
Homepage: Astralwerks Records