Chemical

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the vinyl reissue of Born In The Echoes by The Chemical Brothers. After over a quarter century of holding dance clubs hostage with some of the most well-known club-pop ever to also grace radio airwaves, the question has become how The Chemical Brothers have held the the venerable position they have. They are some of the most visible purveyors of dance club music and culture after all and, in a form which...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the 2LP Astralwerks reissue of Come With Us by The Chemical Brothers. Ever experienced a moment when, through no fault of its own, an album just seems to go underappreciated and/or just generally taken for granted, reader? It’s not an incredibly common occurrence, but it does happen; every so often, an album will suffer because it really just feels like “more of the same,” no matter how good it might be. For...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the 2LP reissue of Surrender by The Chemical Brothers. Then as now, the conventional wisdom is that Dig Your Own Hole has the biggest of The Chemical Brothers’ entries into the mainstream but, for this critic’s money, the greatest creative triumph of the group’s storied career is their third full-length, Surrender. With Surrender, the group had the mainstream’s attention and knew it, but rather than shying away or being evasive of their...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the 2LP reissue of Dig Your Own Hole by The Chemical Brothers. …And then, with the release of Dig Your Own Hole, The Chemical Brothers became a pop culture phenomenon. Now, it could be contended that the arrival and immediate public embrace of Dig Your Own Hole was the result of several different factors intersecting (after grunge, Brit-Pop overtook both the charts and popular imagination thanks to bands including Blur, Oasis and...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the new Exit Planet Dust reissue from The Chemical Brothers. From the outside, The Chemical Brothers have never really appeared to be an act that anyone associates with the concept of “evolutionary development,” but that is really the fault of shortsighted critics who simply assume that the group’s influence and growth is limited because the music first gained life on a series of dance floors. Such rigid thinking is foolish, really; in...

Artist: My Chemical Romance Album: The Black Parade + Living With Ghosts (10th Anniversary 2CD) Label: Reprise/Warner Upon first sight of the tenth anniversary edition of The Black Parade by My Chemical Romance, even the greatest and most fanatical of the band’s fans will find themselves asking, “What the fuck is this?” They’ll be asking not because anything is wrong exactly, just that they won’t be able to immediately recognize what they’re looking at; unlike the original release of The...