CD of the week
Neil Spencer
Mindless pop exhilaration doesn’t come fresher than Hey Boy Hey Girl, the current hit from Eng Lit students turned dance bermeisters, Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons – better known as the Chemical Brothers. A slamming, joyful chunk of techno, it’s already a defining part of the soundtrack to the millennial countdown.
At first, Surrender (Virgin), the third album from the Chemical Brothers, seems intent only on restating the claim to the crown of big beat, the dance genre they originated with Block Rocking Beats and which has subsequently been mined so successfully by Norman Cook, Propeller- heads and others. It unfolds into something rather more rounded, however. The Chemical Brothers never were dance purists, dipping into rock and folk hybrids with Noel Gallagher and Beth Orton. Gallagher fronts Let Forever Be, a visitation of the Beatles’ Rain, New Order’s Bernard Sumner does vocal duties on Out of Control and Mazzy Star’s Hope Sandoval lends her sultry drawl to Asleep From Day.
There are also textured soundscapes like Got Glint? and the delicate psychedelia of The Sunshine Underground. The result is not so much a dance album as a cunningly crafted exposition of Nineties pop, highly polished and utterly accessible.
Soundbites
Brahms: Violin Concerto; Violin Sonata No 3 in D Minor (Teldec) The partnership between conductor Daniel Barenboim and Maxim Vengerov on violin finds expression in this 1997 live recording of the Brahms Violin Concerto. The first movement whips up into a frenzy of nervous excitement without losing sight of its lyrical quality. Vengerov, playing a Stradivarius with his acclaimed technical virtuosity, has written a harmonically adventurous cadenza. Barenboim switches to the piano for the grand D Minor Violin Sonata, one of the great works of the violin/piano repertoire. – Neil Spencer
Mansun: Six (EMI) Another complex rock recording, with layers and textures that take some time to get to grips with. Mansun play a poppy kind of rock that is deceptively complex. The songs feature a strong combination of traditional rock with the best of new music technology. Six shows just how far Mansun have come since their inception and is worth the extra attention it demands. – Dave Chislett
Rolling Stones: No Security (Virgin) The world is not exactly lacking in live Stones recordings. The novelty of this one, culled from the ongoing Bridges to Babylon mega- tour, is apparently that none of these songs has been released before in live versions. No Satisfaction #789, then. A good idea – the more recent songs sound meatier than their studio versions, but the success rate on the older numbers is lower. – Shaun de Waal
Sexmob: Din of Iniquity (Columbia) It’s pleasing to know that somewhere in the vast United States (probably in New York and not much elsewhere), there are new bands playing free jazz – especially when it’s as engagingly loose-limbed as this. Sexmob take their source material from popular music, cheerily and brassily deconstructing Prince’s Sign O’ the Times, Bond themes, and, of all things, the Macarena. – SdW