FEATURE:
Where Do I Begin?
The Chemical Brothers’ Dig Your Own Hole at Twenty-Five
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TWO years after…
PHOTO CREDIT: Dave Tonge/Getty Images
their amazing debut album, Exit Planet Dust, The Chemical Brothers (Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons) keep that hot streak going with Dig Your Own Hole. I think the best three albums from the duo include their first two, plus their third studio album, Surrender (1999). I think that Dig Your Own Hole might be their strongest and most important album. Released on 7th April, we mark twenty-five years of a classic. I feel 1997 was a year when things changed a lot in music. Britpop and other scenes were dying out. We were seeing more Electronic and Big Beat albums coming through. Bands who started recording a particular way pushed their boundaries and adopted new sounds (Radiohead’s OK Computer (1997) is a great example). Featuring some of the duo’s biggest songs, Block Rockin' Beats and Setting Sun are classics. An album that every fan of music should have in their collection, I want to use this feature to combine a couple of retrospective articles together with some positive reviews. To start, this article form last April talks about how inspired The Chemical Brothers are on Dig Your Own Hole. The use of guest spots (Noel Gallagher appears on Setting Sun for instance) works brilliantly well:
“The Chems had their roots in blazing dance music, so they still sounded freshest of all on the classic, punishing opener and single, “Block Rockin’ Beats,” which smoothed their formula slightly for the benefit of the masses, but kept all the raw bass, the breakbeats, and the flickers of scratching. The title track then upped the BPMs convincingly, before “Elektrobank” blasted the doors off their hinges. An early harbinger of the electro revival, which only reached full momentum in the new millennium, “Elektrobank” featured the voice of Kool Herc in a nod to hip-hop’s earliest days, and was so propulsive that it nearly juddered itself into pieces, before slurring into a brain-bashing arc of psychedelia.
This signaled the direction for much of the rest of the set, segueing, in traditional Chems fashion, into the mind-expanding glitches of “Piku.” Then the older Gallagher brother loomed over the skyline, heralding the album’s lead single, “Setting Sun.” The Chems had him freefalling into deep water, before he emerged transformed by – and slathered in – electronic trickery. It was a clear update of The Beatles’ late 60s psychedelic period, yet made the group’s own by the undeniable power of their mountain-destroying guitars and lashing beats. Who needed the 60s now?
(Beth) Orton graced the more pastoral, gently pulsating psych piece “Where Do I Begin,” which almost had a touch of 80s indie-pop to it, before the beats crashed in once more. The indie-psych crossover theme was, however, most notable of all on album closer “The Private Psychedelic Reel,” a nine-minute single which featured reverb-soaked clarinet input from hazy American psych-rockers Mercury Rev.
Dig Your Own Hole built on the duo’s debut, and set the tone for the rest of their career to date. Time and again, The Chemical Brothers have produced collections that start out from dance music’s sometimes forbidding fortress, and yet offer variety, depth, and inspired guest spots, both from established acts and glittering new arrivals”.
DJ Mag featured Dig Your Own Hole back in 2018. They argue that, whilst it might not be The Chemical Brothers’ greatest album (I argue it is), it is one of their most important and inspired:
“Dig Your Own Hole' was perhaps not the best electronic album of the 1990s. But there is an argument to be made that it was the most representative, an album that united many of the dance music trends of the decade, while simultaneously blazing brilliant new trails for other acts to follow.
With the release of their debut album, 1995’s ‘Exit Planet Dust’, The Chemical Brothers were still seen in many quarters as representing the lingering remnants of big beat: a fun, if rather shallow, mid ’90s dance phenomenon that combined rock music structures with electronic production. After 1997’s ‘Dig Your Own Hole’, however, it was impossible to see The Chemical Brothers as anything but their own men, a legacy that has stayed with them until today. Open up a new Chemical Brothers album in 2018 and you genuinely don’t know what to expect, from shiny trance fusion to soil-worn psychedelia. This is the legacy of ‘Dig Your Own Hole’, an album that radiated ambition and adventure, as Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons matured as producers, growing up without ever growing old.
‘Dig Your Own Hole’ is an album that can be cut in many different ways, an album that is packed with stories. Within the album’s opening five tracks alone you can find big beat Chemicals (opener ‘Block Rockin’ Beats’, an improbable minor hit on Billboard’s Modern Rock Tracks); electro Chemicals (‘Elektrobank’); hip-hop Chemicals (‘Piku’, whose lolloping groove foreshadows later collaborations with MCs Q-Tip and k-os); and Britpop Chemicals (‘Setting Sun’ with Noel Gallagher, a vast UK hit in the summer of 1996). What is telling is that, even when The Chemical Brothers aren’t at their most adventurous — ‘Block Rockin’ Beats’ could have fit fairly squarely on ‘Exit Planet Dust’, while the duo had already gone down the indie guest vocal route on ‘Life Is Sweet’ with The Charlatans’ Tim Burgess — there is a real confidence to their sound, as if they had taken everything they achieved on their debut album and rendered it in Technicolor.
The song’s waft of psychedelia continues into ‘The Private Psychedelic Reel’, the most ambitious song The Chemical Brothers have ever recorded, combining a sitar hook, great shimmering walls of noise, a clarinet freak out and a stirring chord sequence into a nine-minute masterpiece of psychedelia that you can genuinely lose yourself in. The song takes its name from a recording The Beatles were alleged to have made to soundtrack their acid trips and, incredibly, it actually lives up to its moniker. The Chemical Brothers were big Beatles fans, referencing Ringo’s driving, lopsided beat to ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ on ‘Setting Sun’. But it is on ‘The Private Psychedelic Reel’ where they approach their idols’ grandiose sense of psychedelic adventure, creating an absolute monster of musical liberty.
It is a fitting closer for an album that remains almost unparalleled in electronic music for scope and adventure. Individually, the 11 tracks on ‘Dig Your Own Hole’ are fantastic; collectively they add up to a milestone of musical ambition, one that stinks of the sheer possibility of the electronic sound. In many ways, ‘Dig Your Own Hole’ is a nostalgic album, a reminder of an age in which Britpop, rock, beats, clarinets and psychedelic reels were united in the hearts of open-minded ravers. But it is very forward-looking too, its genre-hopping foreshadowing the post-genre pop world in which we now live. The Chemical Brothers didn’t just dig their own hole back in 1997, then; they dug out a new space for everyone”.
Even if you are not a big fan of The Chemical Brothers or genres like Big Beat and Breakbeat, there are songs on Dig Your Own Hole that will capture you. Mixing different effects, vocals and layers, it is a sublime album that still sound remarkable and layered. I heard the album when it came out in 1997, and I am still picking up on new things twenty-five years later. On 7th April, we get to mark a quarter-century of a ground-breaking album. In their review, AllMusic wrote this in their review:
“Taking the swirling eclecticism of their post-techno debut, Exit Planet Dust, to the extreme, the Chemical Brothers blow all stylistic boundaries down with their second album, Dig Your Own Hole. Bigger, bolder, and more adventurous than Exit Planet Dust, Dig Your Own Hole opens with the slamming cacophony of "Block Rockin' Beats," where hip-hop meets hardcore techno, complete with a Schoolly D sample and an elastic bass riff. Everything is going on at once in "Block Rockin' Beats," and it sets the pace for the rest of the record, where songs and styles blur into a continuous kaleidoscope of sound. It rocks hard enough for the pop audience, but it doesn't compromise either the Chemicals' sound or the adventurous, futuristic spirit of electronica -- even "Setting Sun," with its sly homages to the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows" and Noel Gallagher's twisting, catchy melody, doesn't sound like retro psychedelia; it sounds vibrant, unexpected, and utterly contemporary. There are no distinctions between different styles, and the Chemicals sound as if they're having fun, building Dig Your Own Hole from fragments of the past, distorting the rhythms and samples, and pushing it forward with an intoxicating rush of synthesizers, electronics, and layered drum machines. The Chemical Brothers might not push forward into self-consciously arty territories like some of their electronic peers, but they have more style and focus, constructing a blindingly innovative and relentlessly propulsive album that's an exhilarating listen -- one that sounds positively new but utterly inviting at the same time”.
The final thing I am including is a review from NME. I remember the excitement from fans and the music press when The Chemical Brothers followed their 1995 debut (which was hugely successful) with Dig Your Own Hole:
“The world of 'Dig Your Own Hole', that is - bruised, pissed, moody, stubborn, phenomenally cocksure. A trashing of all dance music's spiritual, pacifying potential. A record designed not to calm savage beasts, but to make them even madder...
It's fabulous, actually. The images we customarily imagine techno to soundtrack - great empty vistas of space, a stainless, genteel vision of the future - don't apply here. Rather, the Chemicals conjure up a grimy, urban and unavoidably violent nightworld. As the speedy, sliding title track whizzes by - a bit like 'Firestarter' but meaner, less camp - it evokes cars crashing, buildings collapsing, faces melting... everything, with compelling inevitability, exploding. Edge-of-the-seat stuff, if you're still sitting down.
Which is unlikely, frankly. If 1995's 'Exit Planet Dust' was a rough'n'ready story-so-far, 'Dig Your Own Hole' is the fully-honed full-on block-rocking cortex-hammering take-no-prisoners real deal, the album whose party omnipotence will only be matched in '97 by The Prodigy's tortuously awaited third excursion. The first three-quarters - 45 seamless minutes”
Reaching number one in the U.K. and hitting the top twenty in the U.S., Dig Your Own Hole arrived ta a perfect moment. There was as shift and evolution in the musical landscape. 1997 also saw Björk release Homogenic. It was a time when these amazing artists were releasing immense work. I think that Dig Your Own Hole is one of the best albums of the 1990s. It is such a mesmeric and mind-blowing album that is beyond criticism. Eleven incredible tracks that take you somewhere else, I was eager and excited to mark the upcoming twenty-fifth anniversary of The Chemical Brothers’…
GLORIOUS second album.