Masters of backbeat: It's 20 years since the Chemical Brothers came out with Exit Planet Dust

Regardless of the mood you’re in, or the time of the day or night, when you hear a lush set of chords pressed-releasedpressed four times like a nuclear reactor breach warning — sampled from Kraftwerk’s 1975 track ‘Ohm Sweet Ohm’ — before a deep voice tells you, “Brothers gonna work it out”, you are bathed with infinite confidence.

As a crackling guitar buzz joins in, with a hyper-ventilating bassline adding its layer to the incantation, your brain is sitting up. With the cymbal crash on the 35th second, your blood — not you — has started to dance.

In the summer of 1995, these were the opening seconds of the opening track of an album by two relatively old chaps by music industry standards — Ed Simons was 25 and Tom Rowlands was 24. The track was ‘Leave Home’. The album Exit Planet Dust. The unrelated Ed ‘n’ Tom were the Chemical Brothers.

Bang in the middle of the last decade of the last century, no one called it EDM, the unfortunate acronym that electronic dance music trying to sound like a banking scheme is known as now. With entities like Orbital, Underworld and the Prodigy already clearing the thickets for a rave-ly time, electronica was picking up a thick, hard, industrial edge. Which is when the Chemical Brothers dropped their big pill. Exit Planet Dust is 20 years old. But put on the album and you’ll immediately understand why David Guetta and others need to be punctured to death by the sharp end of umbrellas by a bunch of sugar-rushed little girls in frocks.

Something to Behold

The sheer symphonic quality of Exit Planet Dust is something to behold. ‘Song to the Siren’, with its wailing start that slips into a master backbeat, is still breathtaking. The Chems’ genius for using ‘guest vocals’ is evident here right from the start as they ‘play’ Charlatans frontman Tim Burgess’ voice in the deceptively gentle, ‘Life is Sweet’. Of course, you can dance your monkey to ‘Chemical Beats’ with its zombie thuds. But this is also true dance music for sofa-sitters.

Nothing, however, quite prepares us for the second album that came out of the Simons-Rowlands garage in 1997. ‘Dig Your Own Hole’ is a modern masterpiece. If Donna Summer distilled the essence of sex in the 1977 ‘disco’ ‘I Feel Love’ by infusing it with an unmistakable soul sound, then the Chems brought every nerve-ending to the turntable in ‘Dig Your Own Hole’.

The opener ‘Block Rockin’ Beats’, creeping up to you like a facesucker, pretty much blows the doors apart. What enters is a groovy, swaggering monster that becomes extra visible under the influence and the strobes. The title track is a layer-by-layer cluster-f**k with the funk laid to the beat. In ‘Setting Sun’ the Chems doff their hat to the Beatles’ ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. And that’s Noel Gallagher of Oasis on the microphone for good measure.

The sheer range travelled by the Brothers becomes most evident in ‘Where Do I Begin’ from the same album. The strings recorded in reverse on a loop that it starts with are injected with chemicals of their own. And then there’s the barley voice of folktronica singer Beth Orton. “Sunday morning I’m waking up/ Can’t even focus on a coffee cup./ Don’t even know whose bed I’m in/ Where do I start?/ Where do I begin?’ We’re in Enid Blyton councountry sipping on chamomile and thinking of putting the bath on. And then at 3:13 into this 5:35 song….

…a whale just crashes from the sky and lets the dust slowly settle all around as the break-beat eats up the peace to replace it with a phatter, heavier peace. Like the whale that you can see in your head, the Brothers are on top of their game here.

Sound Physicists

They outdo this moment only once in ‘The Test’ from their 2002 album, Come With Us. Ed and Tom unfurl true majesty here with the distinctive voice of Richard Ashcroft (of the Verve) holding the sky of the song up: ‘I’m seeing waves breaking forms on my horizon/ Yeah, I’m shining/ Lord, I’m shining/ Oh are you hearing me/ Like I’m hearing you?’ The dark bhajan climaxes in another question, ‘You know, I almost lost my mind/ Now I’m home and I’m free/ Did I pass the acid test?/ Did I pass the acid test?’ That is how this remarkable record ends.

Last week, the Chems came out with their eighth studio album, Born in the Echoes. I stared at its cover on my iPod for a day before playing it. There’s the Diet Mehbooba rumbler, ‘So Deserted’ that RD Burman would have rejected. ‘Go’ is a synth-bop track that lacks the usual infectious qualities of a Chemical Brothers track. ‘EML Ritual’ is a kind of Gregorian chant-meets-Bohemian rhapsody that lacks belief.

To put it bluntly, Born in the Echoes seems to have been contaminated by the very EDM virus that one protected oneself from by listening to the Chemical Brothers. The funny thing is that best track isn’t even on the album — ‘Let Us Build a City’, its itchy-bitchy bass working its way into the system, is a bonus track on the deluxe edition.

But even with Ed ‘n’ Tom pushing me back to the catalogue’s backbeat, the new album — apart from obviously the old ones — leaves me with the tantalising prospect of course correction by these two great particle physicists of sound.