TV Obsessive
The Chemical Brothers- Exit Planet Dust
By Matthew Mansell
Exit Planet Dust is sticky.
It’s an album born of spit and sawdust, not the slick house music of Ministry of Sound or the Balearic beats of Manumission; it’s the sound of toilets with no door, chewing gum floors, ribcage shaking beats, clothes wet from other people’s sweat, and blissful post-adrenaline rushes.
Live music has always thrived in places left behind by modernity; rundown venues and wide open spaces. The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994 had curbed the illegal rave scene and although the Brothers made their name at a residency on the top of a London pub, Tom and Ed were studiously absorbing the sound, culture and feel of those acid house records.
Exit Planet Dust shares the same DIY sensibility of rave from its ramshackle pile-up of genres to its restless musical detours. It’s an album conceived in a studio and Tom’s bedroom but created with those rundown venues and wide open spaces in mind.
It was at a converted sports hall in Birmingham, November 30th 1999 that I saw the Chemical Brothers live, and I saw full potential of the live experience. For two seamless hours, Tom and Ed—peering over their kit like mad scientists—lead a heaving mass of raised hands and sore legs to something close to rapture. I had seen Indie bands; I had been to nightclubs but they were passé compared to this. More so then the two albums that succeeded it, Exit Planet Dust captures the religious euphoria of being there.
The first 6 tracks play like a continuous mix. “Leave Home”’s funky licks, phased alarm and “Brother’s gonna work it out” vocal has all the elements that will become their trademark. It’s a taster for the assault of “In Dust We Trust,” an itchy mix of turntable scratches and decaying synths. “Song to the Siren” is pure acid house dissonance, the wailing siren distorted until it becomes a whirring machine, with only the low bass thunder of the organ left to fill the void. “Three Little Birdies” plays as an extended remix of the previous track, its squelchy synths brought to heel by tightly regimented breakbeats, buttering us up for “F*ck Up Beats”—2 minutes of deep bass throb. The shrill screeching and stuttering funk of “Chemical Beats” slows things down a tad, ending the first half with the sound of exhausted grunts.
The second half trades in heavy ambience. Tom and Ed use deep psyche, dub and drones to tease out the listeners’ high. ”Chico’s Groove” recalls My Bloody Valentine at their most ethereal. The shimmering “One Too Many Mornings” is the moment at the gig where you put your hand in the air to try and find some cool air-conditioned air near the roof. “Life is Sweet” raises the tempo to a slow old-skool swagger, with hip hop beats and aquatic bass raining down on from high. While “Playground of a Wedgeless Firm”’s sound collage of overstretched strings and heavily filtered vocals tries to distract us from the inevitable end of the night we know that is coming.
The chilled out dub of “Alive Alone” draws the set to a close. Beth Orton’s voice sounds youthful but cracked with ageless wisdom. She sums up the catharsis of the live gig: “And I’m alive and I’m alone but and I’ve never wanted to be either of those.”
The shared enjoyment of coming together to enjoy live music isn’t a luxury; for most it’s a mental necessity. It’s no coincidence that rave culture came at a time of high unemployment; it’s a communal release of anxiety. In the UK, illegal parties are again on the rise during lockdown. The joy of Exit Planet Dust isn’t just how it recreates the live experience at a time when gigs have been mothballed but the hope that in a few years some new artist will release an album as exhilarating as this.
The Fall- The 27 Points
By Chris Flackett
“PROZAC! It’s a good life, bowing to tyrants…”
Trust The Fall to release anything but a typical live album, or rather trust Mark E. Smith. The frontman and group leader was nothing if not individualistic, and The 27 Points reflects the challenging, absurd and esoteric attitude of its writer very well.
Across two discs we get a collection of live recordings from various gigs recorded between 1991 and 1995. The recording quality varies from track to track; sometimes there is the crisp audio quality of a recording possibly taken from the soundboard; other times it sounds like a bootlegger has recorded a show performed by the group in a tiny shed, the recording device hidden inside said bootlegger’s backside (I could imagine Smith quite enjoying the perverseness of such a technique!).
There are also two new studio tracks that the group recorded for the album. “Cloud of Black” is the stronger of the two, mixing ‘90s dance elements into the Fall sound, which would become more apparent on 1997’s Levitate. The magnificently titled “Noel’s Chemical Effluence,” meanwhile, combines jangle and noise in a way that is a little reminiscent of Seamonsters-era Wedding Present (something Smith would have been incredulous about if told, I’m sure).
The group are often on form, pounding out great, repetitive garage rock, always tough, never slick, but this is Smith’s show. He always had a reputation for being a prickly, erratic performer, his performance often depending on the state of his mood, and the album captures that perfectly.
When both group and frontman are on form together, the results are astounding. “Paranoid Man in Cheap S**t Room” is vital and energetic. “Glam Rocket/Star” manages to splice together two recordings of two different tracks and is all the more vicious and incendiary for it, full of fire and violence.
But the other side of Smith, the unpredictable, erratic, mischievous side, is evident too. We get walk-offs (“Back in two minutes,” Smith tells the audience), altered lyrics and vocals (“Bounce” sees Smith drone in a Northern English robot voice, before switching to stoned American: “I don’t know man…”), classical intro music—half way through the album, demands made to the soundman, spoken word harangues played over the P.A. and, of course, a recording made on a cheap tape recorder of a conversation between Mark E. Smith and a friend, whose topic veers from a Frank Zappa biography to awful jokes (“what do you call a man with a spade in his head?”).
Your mileage for all this will vary, but if you’re already a Fall fan, you know it’s all par for the course. And what it does do is quite accurately reflect the tension and uncertainty of a Fall show, for both group and audience. You never quite knew what you were going to get, and within that was a definite sense of excitement and intrigue. The 27 Points is successful in how it reflects this experience and for that, it is a worthwhile listen, if uneven at times.
“We are The Fall!” Smith used to shout triumphantly. I wouldn’t have had it any other way.
Garbage- Garbage
By John Bernardy
In a crowded field of women who rocked, Shirley Manson stood out. She was the kind of wild that was alluring, and in 1995 everyone was talking about her. I wasn’t into the music scene when she was singing in Angelfish, but when Garbage debuted in 1995, all you needed to do was turn on a radio for ten minutes and there they were. “Vow,” “Only Happy When It Rains,” “Queer,” Stupid Girl,” and “Milk” all made it to the radio by the end of the ’95-’96 school year, and I was all for it.
“Supervixen” immediately kicks in with electronically-aided pitch bends, buzzes, and swishes that Butch Vig and the band wanted to create so that they sounded like a band who couldn’t dare perform their sound live. They’d been honing that kind of production for a while by reconstructing and remixing others’ music, and that style became the foundation for Garbage’s uniqueness. Add rock/pop song structures and hooks, and you get one of the first true indicators of what new music was going to sound like in a post-grunge world.
Vig had produced a ton of classic albums by this point (Nevermind, anyone?) so he wasn’t going to be the drummer of just any band. Enter Manson, who should’ve rightly been up there with Siouxsie Sioux in the pantheon of goth singers, yet here she was destroying us in this hooky rock styled band. The synths plus guitars plus Shirley’s voice is the perfect mid-‘90s combination to sound like no one, and they quickly went to work on us.
“Only Happy When It Rains” is the clear standout of the album. It’s got weepy goth sensibilities and every part is easy to sing along with.
“Queer” has a quintessential sound I’ll forever associate with Poe. “As Heaven Is Wide” begins with this metallic alarm-adjacent sound for a percussion element along with a dance beat—up until its chorus the song could’ve been in an arcade fighter. “Not My Idea” could’ve been on an industrial album. “A Stroke of Luck” is a trip-hop bank heist of a song, and is probably when someone figured out Manson could sing a properly sultry Bond theme. Aside from its memorable panning guitars, “Vow” gives a solid Hole vibe, and somehow the production effects don’t change much but the song is mellow and contemplative at the end.
“Stupid Girl” almost starts like the drum part in the pre-guitar part in the Beatles’ “The End” before quickly kicking into the album’s second-catchiest song. That guitar part in the chorus will be in my head for a while and I’m fine with that.
The songs that remain (before album-closer “Milk”) are less interesting to me yet still solid. In particular, the chorus of “Fix Me Now” reminds me of something so strongly it must’ve been used in a show or movie. Then “Milk” gets quiet, distant, sultry, and intense at once. This song ends the album strong, and also works as a beginning for the sound palate the band will perfect in Romeo + Juliet’s soundtrack song “#1 Crush.”
I knew this album would be worth revisiting, but listening reminded me of just how present it used to be. And now I know how easy it is to bring it all back. I’ll definitely be listening to this one again, sooner this time.
