The Chemical Brothers - Dig Your Own Hole

9.0 - England - 1997

Nearly twenty years after its release, it's hard to overestimate the importance of this record. Dig Your Own Hole came out at a time when, in Britain at least, electronic acts such as the Chemical Bros. threatened to take over the previously guitar-oriented rock 'n roll (see also: Prodigy, The). This album represented the culmination of a process that had been going, surely, since the late 70s in which the boundaries between "live" instrumentation and programmed electronics were being demolished. New Order playing sequencers on stage; Oakenfold producing the Mondays; Primal Scream getting famous on the backs of the work of The Orb, Andrew Weatherall et al; and so on and so on. And now the fruits of this zeitgeist were no longer confined to guerilla house parties, but could now be blared to timid surbanites on MTV and in television commercials. No wonder that traditional rock stars were keen to get in the act (viz. Noel Gallagher as a ringer on "Setting Sun"). Standing on the shoulders of this history -- the legacy of acid house and Madchester -- the Chemical Brothers, two Medievalists, looked forward to a big beat future that, alas, was never quite to be. And so now, looking back, this record exists as a psychedelic artifact (the follow-up, Surrender, would further cultivate a vibe of hippies sixtiesisms) of a time when the retro-minded archive of the sampler and sequencer would be the new rock star. Sure, the best they got on the left side of the Atlantic was the Hackers soundtrack and rap-rock nu-metal shite, but it need not have been that way.

Some track mentions: "Block Rockin' Beats" is precisely the earth and ass shaking groove that epitomized the big beat genre. "Dig Your Own Hole" has got some great, as they credit in in the liners, "fizz funkin' wah bass", and the valedictory synth solo at the end of "Electrobank" is a thing of wonder. In some places -- "Piku" and the "It Doesn't Matter"-"Get Up On It Like This" suite -- things sound slightly out-of-synch, but that could be just me. And how about them buzzsaws on "The Private Psychedelic Reel"? Note: the clarinet played on that last track was not actually played by Mercury Rev's Jonathan Donahue but rather the Rev's reedman Mark Marinoff.