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The Chemical Brothers Album - Come With Us
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Release Date:2002-01-01
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Type:Album
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Genre:Electronic/Dance, House, Dance
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Label:Astralwerks
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Explicit Lyrics:No
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Review - AMG :
Don't call it a comeback (they never left) or a return to the underground (there's still a spot reserved in Britain's Top Ten). Still, after disappointing critics and fans with increasingly crossover material, Chemical Brothers Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons returned with a tighter, more danceable record, including fewer rock star collaborations (only two, shunted toward the end) and a lead single ("It Began in Afrika") introduced almost a year before, on white label only, for crucial DJ ground support. From the vocal sample introducing the opener ("behold...they're coming back"), it's clear Rowlands and Simons know the importance of this fourth album, and it detonates like a bomb blast, as though the duo knew that Come With Us had to be bigger and badder than all the bombastic breaks they'd dropped in the past. "It Began in Afrika" is next up, with percussion-heavy tribal-house charging into trance-state acid and a warping vocal sample repeating the title. After the opener, "Galaxy Bounce" is the best track here, locking into a nice Chic groove and alternating a strutting drum break with stop-time turntablism. The vocal features are solid but ignorable; Beth Orton's "The State We're In" is a predictable, pleasant folkie jam, and Richard Ashcroft's closer, "The Test," a pseudo-mystical breakbeat epic. The Chemical Brothers' best studio work has a kinetic energy and pace borrowed from the flow of their DJ sets. After forgetting the key on 1999's Surrender amidst handling all of the celebrity guests, they got back to business with Come With Us. ~ John Bush, All Music GuideReview - Yahoo! Music - Ken Micallef :
If the Chemical Brothers' last album, Surrender, was where the English big-beat duo got in touch with their inner child that used to boogie down 'til dawn, Come With Us is their attempt to forget the past and forge a brave new future. And it works--almost.
The opening title track and the following "It Began In Africa" are the most overblown, boisterous musical events the pair have ever conceived. Spinning a mad stylee stew of whirling string arpeggios, flailing drums, and Liberace keyboard crescendos, "Come With Us" goes for broke over a slo-mo disco groove. "It Began In Afrika" ups the ante further with a gleeful house beat, lunatic bongos, congas, and the Bros' trademark sky-is-falling, fazers-on-kill audio antics.
After that the beats keep coming, but the ideas dry up. The warm-blooded "Star Guitar" is the exception, a hypnotically gooey track that morphs from techno chill to sunny ambient groove with a rare economy of sources. Also interesting is "Pioneer Skies," a trippy sonic experiment in keeping with a long line of English gear geeks. Monotony sets in with "Hoops," which exploits an annoying vocal hook, though its acoustic guitars and acid breakbeat are a hoot. "My Elastic Eye" and "Denmark" just tread water, while Beth Orton's ubiquitous appearance on "The State We're In" is tired at best. Finally, Richard Ashcroft is enlisted for "The Test," but a bored Mick Jagger impersonation is all he can muster over the song's tangerine big beats and whiz-bang marmalade mood. Time to pull out Dig Your Own Hole while the Bros. claw through this current slump, er, evolutional period.
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