When the Chemical Brothers are on top of their game, it's hard for anyone in their genre to touch them. In those moments, their sound threatens to go completely over the top, the massive beats and electronic squelches ripping through the speakers like they're about to physically jump out into your living room. Back in '97, I would drive around listening to "Block Rockin' Beats," unable to feel like anything but a bad motherfucker. I might have only been behind the wheel of a Jetta, but that's not the issue.
Of course, a good way to judge a Chemical Brothers album is via the ego-inflation factor. If you're feeling like Al Capone with a fat bank roll and a baseball bat, the Brothers are achieving the desired effect; if you feel like you're shopping for designer footwear, things have veered horribly off-course. The fact is, the Chemical Brothers' greatest strength lies in their ability to lay down irresistibly fat basslines and breakbeats that would make Bootsy Collins' fingers bleed. A good Chemical Brothers track should bulldoze any form of criticism simply because it's a strictly visceral experience-- you press play and send the frontal cortex to its room to play with blocks for a while.
The big question going into Come with Us was whether they'd come out Kung-Fu fighting or serve up another batch of watered-down techno beats like those dished out on their previous album, Surrender. I wanted to see them rely less on guest cameos (almost invariably a bad sign)-- Bernard Sumner and Hope Sandoval should stay as far away from the studio as possible, preferably with a 300-pound bouncer with a pit bull screening the door-- and they generally do. Sure, Beth Orton and Richard Ashcroft managed to get their fingers in the pie, but some of these tracks also return to what the Chemical Brothers do best. In the end, it's a mixed bag.
Come with Us flies out of the gates unexpectedly with its first three tracks, immediately dragging the listener through a relentless torrent of beats and sonic energy. The title track, with its agitated, looped strings, undulating waves of syrupy keyboards, shouts, and strong backbeat, is reminiscent of the Beastie Boys at their most raucous; "It Began in Afrika" is a rapid, heart-pounding conga workout that distills the quick reflexes and primal urges of a cheetah hunt under a deadpan voice repeating, "It Began In Afrika-ka-ka"; and "Galazy Bounce" features a repeated call-and-response sample over tight, driving slap-bass funk. None of this is a thought-provoking music in the slightest, and I wouldn't want it any other way. These tracks are purely functional-- all speed, sweat and clenched muscle-- and, as convenient packets of immediate party energy, they succeed admirably well.
Of course, it's when the Chemical Brothers deviate from their role as Big Beat deities that problems arise. "Star Guitar" apparently substitutes for the missing Sumner track-- it's slight, but not nearly as vapid as "Hoops," the song that follows it. Honestly, none of the remaining material returns to the quality of the first three cuts, though "My Elastic Eye" and "Denmark" do manage to turn up the heat a bit. But there's not much to be said about the Orton ("The State We're In") and Ashcroft ("The Test") numbers, other than that they're both about as middle-of-the-road as you might expect they'd be. "The Test," for example, sounds like a weak companion piece to the Simple Minds' "(Don't You) Forget About Me," and Orton's admittedly seductive vocals aren't nearly enough to rescue an inherently bad song.
Yep, Come with Us is another let down, no two ways about it. And all because Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons seem confused about where they'd like to go. There are certain things they do very well, yet they don't seem to be content with being pigeonholed as one-dimensional. Unfortunately, one-dimensional is about the only thing they can pull off convincingly.
