The Chemical Brothers: Dig Your Own Hole : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

For two guys who just play records for a living -- records that get chopped up, digitally reconfigured and rendered otherwise unrecognizable to the original copyright holders -- the Chemicals (Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons) are truly gifted composers. The hotfoot funk and car-chase-soundtrack dynamics of "Dig Your Own Hole," the vertiginous Beatlemania of "Setting Sun," even the locked-groove, pagan-sun-dance surge of "The Private Psychedelic Reel": This is the stuff of real songs. The rhythms stretch out and slap back with assiduously crafted, rise-and-fall momentum ("Block Rockin' Beats" is the "Whole Lotta Love" of Dance Floor '97). And while the Chemicals know what to do with a good singer ("Where Do I Begin," with British rave-crowd chanteuse Beth Orton, sounds like Jane Birkin-does-"Ummagumma"), they don't need words or voices to get their basic message across. Which is: Shut up, trance out, dance your ass off.

Prodigy get by nicely on ferocity alone; "Fat of the Land" hasn't sold 1.3 million copies in the U.S. because of its textural depth or stimulating lyrics (it has little of either). If it weren't for the distinctively plastic sound of the drum programs and the gulping-synth noises that pass for melody, "Fat" would barely qualify as electronica. Producer, writer and chief button pusher Liam Howlett shaves his songs and samples down to a chain-saw-guitar buzz that has "Hey! Ho! Let's go!" stamped all over it. But Howlett's riffs go nowhere after initial impact, and google-eyed stage demon Keith F