Chemical Brothers - Dig Your Own POLL*

I'm probably a stan of extended songs but this is truly down to Elektrobank or TPPR, went with Elektrobank just 'coz.

this album is solid

Piku (would be Lost In The K-Hole but always found it a bit too short)

I love love love this entire album to death

I'm probably voting "It Doesn't Matter" because a) TPPR will win anyway and b) it deserves a vote because it's awesome

I've been a sucker for the 1-2 punch of the last two songs since this came out, and find it hard to separate them (you know, like "Brain Damage"/"Eclipse" or "Heartbreaker"/"Living Loving Maid"). But fuck it, I went with "The Private Psychedelic Reel".

I've been a sucker for the 1-2 punch of the last two songs since this came out, and find it hard to separate them

otm

I really like "Where Do I Begin" but I don't need to hear it every time I decide to listen to TPPR. Nice segue, mind.

In fact, it's been quite a while. *puts WDIB on*

The end of WDIB is so bonkers and awesome

Shit, I haven't listened to it since Sept '06!!!

That ending when it goes mental, oh man. I am stoked for four minutes' time.

Shit, I haven't listened to it since Sept '06!!!

lol itunes era

The only time I've played the entire album straight through was Christmas Day '05 :-/

Ah yeah, I remember now. As bonkers tuneless workout endings by high-profile 90's electro acts go, this is good, but it ain't no "Narayan".

that better be a self-parody

dear HKM,

the last two minutes of "Narayan" >>>>> the last two minutes of "Where Do I Begin"

sincerely,

uh, no

I like "Naryan" a lot but that is just madness

Yes crazy talk.

OK, to qualify, I'm *just* talking about the buzzsaw bit, not the HUGE distorted electro climax just beforehand (or the gentle segue into TPPR)

Private Psychedelic Reels is the one where Mercury Rev play their mad homemade synth thing, isn't it? I'm gonna have to dig it out and find out.

Narayan's the one with the dude from Kula Shaker on isn't it?

yes to both of those

yeah, and the ENORMOUS mentalist psychedelic drum'n'clater ending, which has 0 to do with our Crispian xp

*clatter

YES. (i.e. the Mercury Rev link.)

What album is Naranyan on? I kinda gave up on them around the time of Surrender.

It would help if I could spell.

It's on The Prodigy's "Fat of the Land".

I gave up on the Chems circa Surrender as well, but Come With Us lured me back in and I loved We Are The Night.

to be fair the last minute or so of Narayan IS better than ppl remember (clue: Mills has stopped singing by this point)

TPPR made me totally bored of epic album closers as parting statement

never did get the Surrender hate (not that i ever want to listen to 'Dream On' ever ever)

Ha ha ha, I never liked The Prodigy.

It's funny how Chemical Bros were, like, *the* 90s dance superduo it was OK for rockists to like.

And they got away with it in a way that, say Justice, get loads of shit for doing essentially the same thing.

"Hey Boy Hey Girl" is one of their best singles ever but I had such a visceral hate reaction to "Music: Response" that it carried over into the rest of the album; that's another one I only ever played once and basically said "ugh, never again" to. Odds are if I heard it now, I'd like it a lot more!

It was that FREAKING AWFUL song with Barney Sumner on it that did it in for me. (Or am I thinking Primal Scream? I get them mixed up sometimes.)

This thread has inspired me. I'm going to stop downloading obscure The Factory b-sides and actually listen to Surrender for the first time, basically, since I bought it.

haha i hated music: response too and i cant remember why

first impulse is to vote for setting sun if im being honest

It was that FREAKING AWFUL song with Barney Sumner on it that did it in for me.

"Out Of Control"! I hated that one too, but then heard it out of the context of the album years later and was kind of into it, which is why I'm pretty sure that I'd be into the album now.

I thought Surrender was pretty awesome at the time but I haven't listened to it in years.

Surrender is awesome! I way prefer it to DYOH. Start with "Out Of Control" and let it play from there. The midsection is *just* brilliant (LFB>>>TSU>>>AFD)

"We Are The Night", if you trim the fat off it, is completely fucking wonderful as well, and TRULY underrated. "Burst Generator" and "We Are The Night" are up there in my Chems top 5.

Oh god, also HO HO HOPE Sandoval is on this record. A lot to hate.

Maybe "A Modern Midnight Conversation" as well.

i first heard 'Out Of Control' while on a train to Bristol en route to my first Glastonbury where the album was getting predictably rinsed all over the sun-drenched site from various stalls and tents so imo it remains totally fucking great

I am probably unhealthily obsessed with "Battle Scars".

yes

Hey you know what, Music: response isn't actually that bad. I really like the Sonic Boom VCS3 synth wubs it starts with.

Hmm, Surrender v DYOH is a tricky one. PPR > Dream On, but Let Forever Be > Setting Sun (even though I find "how does it feel like" to be irritatingly ungrammatical").

it's supposed to be "how does it feel, like...", scouser style

Hooray you have transformed it for me!

I'll vote for the obvious choice: "Setting Sun." Blew my mind.

As for Surrender, "Out of Control" and "Hey Boy: Hey Girl" compensate for Hope Sandoval and Mercury Fucking Rev.

Actually, in terms of the *music*, I'm liking it (Surrender) a lot more than I did at the time. Though barney's off key singing still bugs the heck out of me.

(I did hear a rumour that there was originally more backing that he was supposedly singing along with, and that they took it out in the mix to make it more minimal and Moroder, with the effect that his vocal riff no longer makes any sense at all.)

I think perhaps I judged it a bit too harshly because its release coincided with one of the most rabidly rockist periods of my life.

I really like "Where Do I Begin" ...

― I want sprinkles (country matters), Monday, 23 February 2009 16:48 (50 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Oh yeah, Beth Orton, innit?

surrender is epic

Believe me, it got less and less exciting after the first half-dozen

(Not to try and OUT-INDIE Louis or anything, but I did actually find out about Connan from some genuine Teenagers - I have my ear to the ground of today's modern yoot, me. I find out about bands the old fashioned way - I read them getting slashed on LiveJournal!)

I still have huge piles of unlistened-to near-certain-crap lying about, and have fantasies of one day remixing them all together into a brilliant work of epic genius

Oh man Kate that is unimaginable

back with another one of those block rockin' beats

I am sorry for making this thread about Connan Mockasin and Bobb Trimble fey out-indie-ing each other posturing. (That is some slash that needs to happen... hrmmm...)

Ooh ooh yeah, Big Beat, electro, um, Chemical Brothers, yeah. HEY GIRLS. HEY BOYS. SUPERSTAR DJs HERE WE GO!

getting promos as a student was like Christmas every day. i got Middle Of Nowhere a few months before release, before internet leaks really took off.

Great finds in student radio promo piles: years ago when I first worked at the library and it was the music & film department, we had the old uni radio vinyl collection, which was mostly utter shit (a Momus 12", I mean, COME ON), but in amongst all the crap I found a 12" copy of the Lazarus EP by the Boos, and a 12" of Blue by Bark Psychosis. So it's not all total crap. Just most of it.

getting promos as a student was like Christmas every day. i got Middle Of Nowhere a few months before release, before internet leaks really took off.

― O Supermanchiros (blueski), Tuesday, February 24, 2009 5:22 PM (41 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

samesies... not too many rap cds. we had handsome boy modelling club.

those were the days when you actually got good things in the mail

like, in our radio library, there's actually quite a lot of good stuff from the 90's/early 00's, but the recent additions have seen some crazy drop-off

you hardly ever got American music

even music hacks seem to have to go into the record company offices to, like, hear what they're meant to be reviewing nowadays. *shakes head*

ANYWAY.

who is this doin' this synthetic type o' alpha beta psychedelic funkin'

i actually like this idea of hearing an album for the first time with a bunch of people in similar position in same place tho

it's like FILMS omg

k-hole & electrobank my favorites when i last listened to this (july 24th, 1998, 3:43-4:46 pm). went w k-hole cuz it's too short, which is always nice

lol

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

"Where Do I Begin". This is my least favourite Chemicals album and I have no idea why people consider it their best. I like their underrated noughties work generally much better, although the debut probably remains my favourite Chemicals album.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

I think this is almost the perfect outcome

I guess I'm just another un-hip late comer to the Chems who worshipped Surrender apon release and thought Dig was feh, aside from the awesome-even-to-idoits Setting Sun... all of which makes me the height of douche baggary.

i wanna know what geir thinks of the last 90 seconds of his favourite track

This record sounds so good to me now, first time listening in probably over a decade. Even the overplayed at the time "Setting Sun" is sexy as hell.

I love ILX.

K Hole!!!

So so dope

Their first album too, is a lot more banging than I remember.

First album weirdly not talked about much, I find?

I've always kinda felt the first two albums were secretly way too tuff n ruff outside the singles for a lot of people, Surrender seemed to be greeted with a lot of pent up enthusiasm amongst friends of mine who wanted a dance album that was "crossover" in substance as well as reputation (to be fair they were all 17 years old).

Opposite here. Surrender was not well greeted as far as I remember. Way too diluted and Britpoppy.

yeah I was reading magazines and on a bunch of dumb mailing lists at the time and it seemed like a lot of people were not a fan of Surrender - though I liked it quite a bit

I do revisit Dig from time to time and I agree, it ought to sound terribly dated by now but it still rules.

I haven't heard surrender for a while but memory is a couple good tracks and mostly disappointment.

rarely listen to exit planet dust, dig your own hole or surrender (lol @ my last post itt), but all 3 still sound great when i do, especially dig. massive, mighty, and dated just right. beyond the odd stray track ("star guitar"), i'm not much interested in what came after. so put me down with the hivemind, i guess.

Star Guitar is great yeah.

I definitely remember Surrender being met with mild disappointment compared to the first couple, especially given the monstrous single that preceded it. Then again it was 1999 and that was happening with most of the big album dance releases.

the best thing about the first album is that there's no Noel Gallagher on it. Somehow I really like the Tim Burgess track.

His voice is so fx'd up, tho (Noel's), it's not blatantly obvious that it's hum

him

rediscovered my love for this and EPD by adding them to my workout playlist. they always deliver too.

This has always been a favorite of mine. From start to finish it is damn solid and the last 2 tracks create a hugely epic ending. I'd probably vote for Elektrobank.

I was recently stoked to discover Got Glint off of Surrender heavily sampled Bernard Fevre. I was recently listening to Cosmos 2043 and Earth Message was essentially a stripped down version of the song. Fun times.

RE: Surrender (upthread), I remember liking it quite a lot at the time of its release, even if (or because?) it was different from the (studio) albums that proceeded it: https://web.archive.org/web/20010112123300/http://www.skinny.com/music/reviews/1999/06/html/chemicalbros2.html

I heard Surrender as the crossover hybrid that appealed to Friends of Tim F; its more accessible aesthetics as a set list complement to the to roughest moments of Exit and Dig. (Fwiw, my friends and I were in our mid-20's.)

I always forget how aggressive and just loud "Setting Sun" is.

When I was 17 it sounded very dangerous and intense and sexy and it still kind of does.

I also remember Where Do I Begin completely blowing my mind at the time, the idea of a "singer songwriter" doing a looped, four-line, wistful poem over a druggy backwards guitar sample and then going into a massive breakbeat. My god that sounds terrible when I write it out but it's sooooo good.

25 years... Time can be scary sometimes.

all the alt mixes on the reissue are really good. Especially the one of it doesn't matter. Listen to that one with some good headphones and you'll have a good time.

Might have to pick it up, I bought the original LP back in the day without a way to play it and when I finally got a turntable I found out I got two of the first record

Surprisingly this record actually sorta holds up

Yeah, it slaps.

Perfect album that changed my life when I was 9

"sorta"?????????