The Chemical Brothers – “Born in the Echoes”: dancefloor paranoia – SPIEGEL ONLINE

It’s the fate of many pop pioneers that they end up after work and give due glory offside history, in a drawer with the inscription “In the past times horny”.

The British electro duo The Chemical Brothers, the mid-nineties to have for the transformation of techno and club music in mainstream pop, seemed long ago exceeded the responsible relevancy Zenit.

The over ambitious concept album “Further”, which was released five years ago, might have been a last resort, majestic statement regarding the status of the current dance and club music. A concert film of 2012 already looked like a farewell. Rest in peace and with dignity?

Not yet! Now reverse the Chemical Brothers, both mid-40s, with an album back, waited for no one, however, which contains some of the best songs that Ed Simons and Tom Rowlands published in the past 20 years.

Especially startling: “Born in the Echoes” not wanzt how one might have expected, cramped closer to current electronic dance music trends. Instead, the brothers who are in the spirit which only peeled, again its primordial sound forth.

The very first song on the album, “Sometimes I Feel So Deserted”, rest on an analog synthesizer-beam zoom and empties into the typical oppressive, on sequencer squawking, Guitar grumbling and zoom thunderous beats and basses anabolic Chemical Brothers Groove.

This is reminiscent of the then unheard-of sound attacks of “Leave Home” or “Block Rockin ‘Beats”, which once started a trend that was BigBeat and acts like Fatboy Slim and The Prodigy only in the Clubs and then pounded into the charts. It was the electrifying fusion of pop and techno that eventually paved current megastar DJs like Skrillex, David Guetta or Calvin Harris the way.

The art of omission

All right, a typical “look back to the future” story thus: Aging band reflects on spilled virtues to the epigones to show again, where the rubber meets the road. Or?

Originally, Tom Rowlands admits in an interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE, gave it to “Further” “no reason or obligation to carry on”, at times, there was not even a record deal. In addition, Ed Simons retired from live events, current performances completed Rowlands without him. He wants to focus on university activities, including Rowlands only says: “Non-specific academic activity” have given as the friend of languages.

As the two DJs were but every now and again to share. A perfect rehearsal for new songs, because in contact with the dancing crowd you realize very quickly what works and what may be unnecessary. “We find it to be very exciting to see how a mass of people to respond immediately to our music,” says Rowlands.

“But at the end someone will hear the drive?”

Just as in the early nineties therefore, as the Chemical Brothers in the Hacienda of Manchester or laying on the Heavenly Sunday Social Club of London and in the studio from samples of old hip-hop and psychedelic sheets together tinkered their sound? Rowlands dismisses, nothing was the same again: “At the beginning of your career, everything is quite simple,” he explains, “you have limited funds, so you turn everything full on.”

Later, there are many options, a great danger. Finally, it is in the studio tempting increasingly draufzupacken on the tracks. The answer: “We had to somehow forget what we had everything on it.” To achieve simplicity, to focus on a really good idea and to trust her, it was a real challenge was – but an important one. Otherwise you lose yourself in the process, “Sure, we can rent a room for seven months in a legendary Berlin club, it would be determined very exciting because at the end someone will take, but listen to the plate.?”

The Chemical Brothers – “Born in the Echoes”

This question is of course, Nevertheless, despite the fact that Rowlands and Simons have simply entrenched only in their own, crowded with analogue equipment home studio near London. Nostalgic and old fans will embrace “Born in the Echoes”, but also for younger people offer an alternative to the Chemical Brothers Niedlichkeitsbombast and well-being of the terrorist Guetta-, Avicii- or Robin Schulz sounds: you get the alarm sirens and the stress in the dance music back.

The constant tension of their influenced by New Wave and post-punk music has always emerged even from the balance of ecstasy and the frustrating everyday dreariness – mirrored in the sometimes aggressive hardness, recently also often hovering ambient melancholy of this sound: “Sometimes I Feel So Deserted,” sometimes I feel so let down.

There are fantastic tracks on “Born in the Echoes”: the hibbeligen Discobeat of “Go” with guest rapper Q-Tip, but also the wayward “Under Neon Lights”, in which St. Vincent with bedröhnter, banger voice sings. Ali Love spreads in lamenting “EML Ritual” paranoia on the dance floor.

“I’ll See You There”, the central piece of the plate, is once again the large, adrift in madness and Waber guitar tribute to the primordial soup of the Chemical Brothers Sounds, “Tomorrow Never Knows” by the Beatles. “It’s such a genius, right !?” says Rowlands excited about the 1966 revolutionary piece of the “Revolver” album. “It catapults you out into another dimension, but it is nevertheless still a simple pop song. Structure and chaos, to bring together these two worlds, that’s what!”

“The future? I’ll see you there, “crows a distorted mocking voice in this most backward cleverest piece of the album: We’ll see you in the future. In the “In the past times horny” posting does not get the Chemical Brothers now.