THE CHEMICAL BROTHERS – "Setting Sun"

“Tomorrow Never Knows is for a world in which few young people take drugs,Setting Sun a world in which almost all do” http://t.co/25eYMWAtZH

All things considered the best no.1 Noel Gallagher has ever been involved with – this really is disturbed psychedelia. It’s a clash of several sounds at once and made a striking chart-topper.
I was never that keen on big beat and much preferred The Chemical Brothers earlier on. The one they did with Tim Burgess – ‘Life is Sweet’ with it’s charming air of summery optimism offers a total contrast to ‘Setting Son’.

This was an absolute, definite 10 for years and years for me – I’d always sort-of known it thanks to its quick ubiquity on television commercials, but when I really started to listen to it in the mid-2000s I was astonished at how groundbreaking this sound was, believing that the Chemical Brothers had single-handedly re-invented dance music forever just through this one, completely original handcraft of music.

The day I first heard ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ was a sad one. And indeed since then the amount of songs of my era I’ve found out that blatantly rip-off older music has bruised and battered my love for them, but in this case it still remains strong and like Tom I’d still give this a 9. An example of something that could be released today and *still* sound absolutely spine-chillingly current and gorgeous, and my favourite bit? The moment two minutes in where it goes BEOOOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWURURURURURUR, for lack of a better word. Transports me somewhere else, for a few brief seconds every time.

Indeed it transports me to Hyde Park in the summer of 2011, when I finally saw them live for the first time. My drink, unknown to me, had been spiked with MDMA, and so occurred my first – and, to date, only – major high. Both this and the how-the-hell-is-it-not-bunnied ’99 classic ‘Hey Boy Hey Girl’ soundtracked a feeling of wild, slightly confusing but glorious abandon, dancing more energetically than I ever have before or since and feeling like this day, this moment was the peak of everything the last 22 years had built up to. Then I believe I passed out, but eh, was fun while it lasted. Nothing that would convince me to ever have another try, although had it been 1991 rather than 2011 – and I were born twenty years earlier – I imagine it would have been a different story.

‘Dig Your Own Hole’, the album on which ‘Setting Sun’ appeared the following year, is an absolute belter: the apotheosis of Big Beat, and a convincing justification for the existence of the genre. And was there an answer, or a bit of a clutching at past glories, in ‘Dig Out Your Soul’, more than a decade later?

Some of it is bunnied, so I’ll leave that alone, and maybe it is a bit early for the rest of the album, too. But Swanstep’s mention of the video for SS reminded me of this one, which I think is even better, and probably my favourite work of any kind by current Oscar hopeful Spike Jonze.

‘Elektrobank’: http://www.mtv.com/videos/the-chemical-brothers/307797/elektrobank.jhtml

maybe my fave work by former oscar hopeful sofia coppola as well. call it postmodernism, call it retromania, call it the return of swinging london but this taps into that fin de siecle ‘hey man remember the 20th century?’ thing that became more and more pronounced as the 90s progressed. big beat never swung enough for me to love it w/o reservation and it’s part of that ‘dance music as another kind of rock music’ a la brostep that’s so so much less appealing to me than ‘dance music as another kind of pop music’ (edm, hip-house) or ‘dance music as another kind of r&b’ (disco disco disco) but for a moment there it was ludicrously fun, the best kind of dumb and obv. 9 for me as well.

Sometime that summer, presumably while I was avoiding working on my MA dissertation, I heard I something very loud coming from the vicinity of Crystal Palace Park just up the road. ‘Is there a gig today,’ I wondered. But it sounded clearer than gigs in either the bowl or the stadium. Then the same song started again. ‘Very loud soundcheck?’ And again… I’m not sure whether I worked it out then, or months later when I actually saw the video. These days, it would’ve taken two seconds on Twitter to know what was going on, and I might have gone up to see whether I could’ve had a glimpse at the video shoot.

This is not one of my favourite Chemical Brothers’ hits – possibly because of Noel, but maybe just because of its attempt at being a song.

My problem with this record is that, even though they’re remaking Tomorrow Never Knows for a world where “almost all” young people take drugs, they’d already done that by playing the Beatles track, in the middle of their sets, surrounded by minimal German techno and Depth Charge records. The context remakes it and always meant this track seemed superfluous to me.

Or probably that’s just the indie snob in me saying I was there first.

@16 Bjork and Barney Sumner feature on 808 State’s Ex:El in 1990/91

1: “Almost all of them [took drugs]” is a deliberate exaggeration – actually, even the most popular drug (weed) was probably consumed by well under half of ‘young people’.

I appreciate the clarification and I know what you’re getting at, but in this case I despise the universalisation of that which isn’t universal. The music press was full of it at the time, and dubious stats like a million people dropping e every weekend. When you’re growing up and you don’t necessarily have many trustworthy windows into young adult life, or at least a young adult life shaped by music, that kind of thing has an effect. At least one young man would’ve made better choices and got to know himself better and earlier without such pernicious chatter.

16: 808 State using Bjork and Bernard Sumner in 1991 is the first I can think of.

“the sound of a time machine crashing” http://t.co/6zaKX5Ygn7 interesting @tomewing piece on loops and endings, via 1996 and Setting Sun

Nice understatement here on the Beatles Wiki re TNK: “Lennon told George Martin that he wanted the vocals to sound like one hundred chanting Tibetan monks, which was a difficult task for Martin with the equipment available.”

P.S. Superlative writing in this entry, Tom, especially that “What makes sense” paragraph.

This is a full 10. That rare beast, a No.1 that’s actually interesting.

#29 ssssort of a remnant of one, i.e. I considered putting in “But this was a fantasy.” at one point. There is a good history of indie and Britpop to be told through a Curtisian lens – the unintended consequences of ideas and all that. And indeed I had a stab at part of it once: http://pitchfork.com/features/poptimist/7865-poptimist-33/

If you’d have asked me in 1996 who my favourite band was, I’d have said the Chemical Brothers, without hesitation. I was 15 and knew next to nothing about dance culture or psychedelia or hip-hop but their music was a route into all of these things and more. When ‘Setting Sun’ came out it felt like they were on a roll following the first album and the ‘Loops of Fury’ EP and I was over the moon when it reached #1 (especially as it replaced ‘BAT’ at the top).

It’s one of their more abrasive tracks (and it sounded like nothing else on the radio at the time) but it’s those divebombing screeches and thundering drums that provide the pop hooks rather than, as Tom notes, Noel’s vocal melody.

As for the Beatles, I liked them at the time but was only familiar with the singles and my mum’s cassettes of Sgt. Pepper and Abbey Road. When I eventually heard ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ about three years later I was surprised by the similarity but it didn’t really diminish my enjoyment of ‘Setting Sun’ at all – I still think it’s an inspired and distinctively ’90s take on the original idea.

So this is a (9) for me too – ‘Life Is Sweet’ with Tim Burgess (as mentioned by anto #5) would be a (10), for what it’s worth.

the processed vocal and screeching sounds provide a superficial link back to TNK for me but there are more things that are different than similar to my ears (not a bad thing, by the way) such as the insistent moebius strip of the beat and deep bass (one might describe them as…um..big).
It’s fascinating how every so often the UK public is prepared to put records at Number 1 such as ‘Paint it Black’, ‘Two Tribes’ and this that make flirting with (self) destruction of one kind or another so compelling.

I saw this as a cynical move by Gallagher to sidestep the potentially lethal “dadrock” label. I’d wager there isn’t much dance music on his iPod. Or maybe it was all a misunderstanding and he thought he’d be helping them re-make the Jam’s fourth album ?

The music ? Absolutely incomprehensible to me. As it was meant to be.

39: Or, you know, Noel might have been a teenager/twentysomething during the Acid House era and might actually like dance music.

Here’s a quote:

“Every night from ’87 until the band formed in ’91, I was there [at The Haçienda]. That was my life and I loved it.”

Here’s another:

“One of the best nights I’ve had out recently was at Coachella. We were up till seven o’clock in the morning, listening to those classic house tunes, going, ‘Why did music have to change? Why couldn’t it have stayed like this?’ Then someone said, It’s because of you! And I was, ‘Yeah, sorry about that’.”

It is possible for people to like stuff that they don’t or can’t (or don’t feel they have the skills to) produce properly – see Primal Scream’s most successful records. At this point in his career, Noel could do anything – teaming up with the best people he could find to continue his ripping off of The Beatles is not about evading Dadrock, imo. He’s doing something he wants to do in an environment that will make it successful artistically and calling back to stuff that he loved as a kid. The idea that he only listened to The Beatles, The Stones, The Jam, The Smiths and The Pistols is a fairly selective reading – and pretty unfair. I’d wager there is plenty of house music on his iPod, just like there’s a load of stuff on my iPod that I liked when I was a teenager (in fact, almost certainly like the majority of people with an iPod/music collection have lots of music they listened to in their formative years). This is one of the attractions of Noel – he’s a person that behaves much of the time like I imagine loads of people do. He actually is an everyman.

I don’t know what to say about this record at the minute. I need to order my thoughts on it first I think. I err on the high side of the mark scheme though.

Re 38 etc What’s I remember is that a lot of the people who took drugs were absolutely convinced that everyone in their (my) generation were doing the same. But I suspect that doesn’t make them that unusual – a lot of people seem to believe that everyone else is basically like/doing the same thing as them.

43: Ha. Fits very well with my comment on something totally different #41. Of course, I could be talking rubbish there about what people have on their iPods – but it feels intuitively right, whereas I never really bought into the idea that everyone was doing drugs when I was a teenager.

Wonderfully bizarre and wonderfully disturbing at the same time, I’d give this 8/10. It’s worth noting that this is one of those songs that I don’t know that I’ve ever heard outside of the context of its video. I wonder if it would have the same effect without the visuals.

BTW, anyone know who the girl in the video is? Is it just me, or do Chemical Brothers videos tend to have female protagonists?

This was the CB’s only Hot 100 hit, peaking at #80. Not that their later music has been completely ignored over here, however. Their remaining bunny got radio play and I’ve seen at least 3 or 4 of their later videos on MTV and other channels. The CB track most Americans would recognize, even if they don’t realize it, would have to be “Galvanize” due to its use in beer commercials and NFL promos.

(Oh – but their next one, that registered! Bunny ahoy.)