I'm not terribly familiar with this album, so I'm guessing there must have been a lot of good music around when it was released in 2010. A quick look at my last.fm scrobbles tells me I was listening to a lot of Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark (they'd just released "History of Modern" after a 14 year gap between albums), Goldfrapp's "Head First" also features and there is a smattering of Hot Chip. But no Chemical Brothers.
In fact, I could have sworn I didn't buy this album when it came out. Yet my
Amazon account tells me I ordered the CD a week before it was released. I bought this re-press of the double vinyl in 2019 and again I was lucky enough to snag this for just £6. The cover image is much better served by the larger vinyl packaging but, disappointingly, the inners are plain black. This seems curious as all of the vinyl Chemical Brothers albums I have reviewed to this point had full colour inner sleeves. However, this may just be a reflection of the original pressing.
Interestingly, this record doesn't include any collaborations with other artists. Three or four tracks feature some great vocals by Stephanie Dosen, but she isn't given any writing credits. There are only 8 tracks but many have extended durations, so the play time is still a healthy fifty minutes or so. The longest track is "Escape Velocity" which is a progressive house / trance groove that employs a continuos cycle of build and release. Despite the twelve minute running time, the track flies by and never seems to get boring. Quite an achievement.
Single "Another World" continues the house orientated vibe and is one of my personal favourites. We get to hear Tom sing (I think) on the entertaining "Dissolve" before things go full "stadium house" with the magnificent "Horse Power". I like "Swoon" but the repeated synth riff begins to grate on me after a while. I can take or leave the last two tracks. Once the Chemicals give in to their slightly noisier rock sound, I lose interest. So another good album that has some epic tracks alongside some less interesting material. 3/5
