"The future? I’ll see you there!" These words come in the middle of the latest album from London dance music survivors the Chemical Brothers. It could be a sly nod to their influence on this decade’s global electronic boom. Back in the mid-1990s, acts like the Chems, Fatboy Slim, and the Prodigy were primed to vanquish guitar rock once and for all while ushering in a squelching age of rave. It didn’t work out that way and, soon enough, Limp Bizkit were dragging their knuckles all the way to the top of the charts. Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons’ radical mix of acid house, hip-hop, and shaggy psych was deemed just another pop fad. But now, with EDM festivals drawing millions of fans around the world and spiritual big beat descendants like Diplo and Hudson Mohawke helping to shape the Hot 100, it’s clear that the Chemical Brothers were both ambassadors and soothsayers. And they’re still around. They deserve to gloat.
Then again, the line could also suggest something more sinister. It’s taken from a spoken-word performance by iconoclastic 76-year-old Canadian poet bill bissett, whose idea of "the future" involves scentless flowers, two-headed babies, and other marks of a hellish apocalypse; for every hit of ecstatic futurism, they seem to be saying, there is an equal and opposite dose of reality. Meanwhile, the music of "I’ll See You There" finds Rowlands and Simons once again tripping out on the past, as howled backmasking and frenzied drums criss-cross in an effort to once again capture the headiness of their own psychedelic pop ur-text, the Beatles’ "Tomorrow Never Knows". All of which leads us to the eternal present—the now—which happens to be a place that suits the Chemical Brothers quite well.
Born in the Echoes is the pair’s eighth album and it continues the creative resurgence ignited by their brilliant last full-length, 2010’s Further, which served as something of a career reset following a decade of flagging potency. But whereas that album was marked by extended dancefloor workouts, seamless DJ-style transitions, and an overall feeling of loved-up euphoria, Echoes is more of a grab bag: Enormous festival fillers and hard-nosed club bangers rub up against wondrously bizarre studio experiments and some of the best pure pop songs Rowlands and Simons have ever made.
Like fellow '90s innovators Daft Punk, the Chems have managed to last more than 20 years in part because they are smart enough to prioritize mindless immediacy. The two upper middle class boys bonded while studying history at Manchester University at the height of the city’s ecstasy heyday; they would read Chaucer’s bawdy Canterbury Tales and then head over to The Haçienda and flail about with 1,000 of their new best friends. They quoted British novelist Evelyn Waugh on an early EP title and then sampled roughneck New York rapper Keith Murray on their ageless classic Dig Your Own Hole. Simons recently returned to the world of academia (and will miss this year’s Chemical Brothers tour dates because of it), while Rowlands recently summed up the duo’s objectives thusly: "We're just really into making funny sounds and putting them into some kind of order that makes sense … Not every song has to be the meaning of life."
So on Echoes we get Q-Tip spouting motivational pizza box rhymes over rubberband basslines on future sports montage soundtrack "Go" followed by St. Vincent staring into the suicidal void of a performer’s high on "Under Neon Lights", which peaks with a guitar (or is it a synth?) solo that searingly recalls "Bulls on Parade". We get the viscous funk of "Taste of Honey"—replete with buzzing bee cameo—next to the taut title track, which features a coolly distant vocal from Cate Le Bon and sounds like a worthy tribute to the late, great psych auteurs Broadcast. Then Beck shows up at the end to help Rowlands and Simons create the finest New Order song in ages. "Wide Open" makes the inevitability of losing it—life, love, inspiration—sound terribly triumphant, and just as the track hits its climax, Beck wisely gets out of the way, making room for undulating waveforms that bristle and burst with all-too-human imperfections.
Talking to Spin about his Big Beat contemporaries in 1999, Ed Simons suggested, "There’s surely going to come a time when those kind of tricks—all the drops and builds and rhythm changes—aren’t going to trigger the same responses in people." Of course, the same could be said of today’s insta-nuke dance tracks, the ones that try to cheat death by just running away from it really fast and really hard. And, to be fair, the Chemical Brothers have deployed plenty of drops and builds and rhythm changes across the last two decades. But Rowlands and Simons’ version of the future isn’t one of narrow-minded annihilation; there are levels to it, along with paths that connect everything from the Fab Four to "Funky Drummer" to Phuture. Part of a fast-moving culture always looking for the next high, the Chemical Brothers remain steadfast—eyeing the past and future while living in the here and now.
