Hanna is a film about a "badass survivalist girl"; the Chemical Brothers have never seemed particularly badass, but it's fair to count them as survivalist, both because last year's Further was their best record in ages and they're the only act from the late-90s electronica boom making music anyone would want to listen to. The Chems are known for welding techno beats to a distinctly rock aesthetic, and for much of the past 10 years they have functioned exactly like a rock band: standard album-tour-relax schedule, few collaborations, monster festival-headliner gigs. (And they can refer to themselves as "superstar DJs" all they like, but their last widely available DJ mix came out in 1998.) For fans of the Brothers, Hanna represents the shockingly rare opportunity to hear a work by the duo whose intentions fall outside their longtime M.O. of making techno for rock fans.
I haven't seen Hanna; it appears to be a thriller set in Eastern Europe with a young female protagonist-- gifted in the art of action-- who eludes a ruthless intelligence operative. Digitized techno mysticism has been a go-to soundtrack of choice for this genre ever since The Bourne Identity rubber-stamped Moby's "Extreme Ways" as the perfect mix of heady paranoia, Euro style, and kicking things. The Chems-- with their widescreen sound, relentless bravado, and sturdy belief in entertainment-as-art-- are well suited for this kind of work.
Hanna sounds a lot like a standard Chemical Brothers album-- [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| saturated, acidic keyboards; thundering drums; styles and signifiers used to bludgeon-- but with a bit more room to breathe. The band isn't deft enough to avoid the mewling vocals and tinkly music-box of the repeated "Hanna's Theme" (pathos: noted) but it's also not deft enough to apply any subtlety or grace to the Eastern scales and pulsing 2-4 beat of "Escape 700", which is kind of the point. This is a band accustomed to soundtracking a light show that would put most stadium rock bands to shame; the chances of them easing off the gas or thinking too hard about the marriage of music and cinema were slim.
The soundtrack offers some of the hard-charging thrills the Chems avoided on Further, and it does so in an environment in which the onus of excitement isn't placed solely on the duo. This results in some terribly limp interstitial "atmospheres"-- the Chems have never had the stomach for this kind of track; they sometimes seem bored (I am)-- but they add welcome contrast to their car-chase songs. Hanna aims for mystery and portent, a slight but welcome tonal shift from the band's urban, galactic edginess. The louche grooves of "Car Chase (Arp Worship)" are a bad fit for the steadily gaining tension they refer to, but its beefy synthesizer roundhouse is the album's most head-nodding moment. They can't help but pepper "The Devil Is in the Beats" with the type of goofily serious vocal nonsense ("Rock the beat!") they've always traded in.
Hanna mostly wins in the sea of Hollywood action soundtracks, but it's marginal as a Chemical Brothers album (I prefer it to their dry, overstuffed mid-decade works). The Chems have rarely acknowledged anything outside their own blinding neon aesthetic, which is to say that not only would the Chems never know they were in a creative rut, they would be unlikely to believe in ruts. Hanna doesn't represent anything more than a slight change-up from a group used to throwing fastballs.
