The Chemical Brothers Dig Your Own Hole

Description

The Chemical Brother’s second album, ‘Dig Your Own Hole‘, was perhaps not the best electronic album of the 1990s, but it was one of the most representative. Released on 7th April 1997, the album 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, 1995s 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 Dig Your Own Hole, however, it was impossible to see The Chemical Brothers as anything but their own thing. It’s a legacy that has stayed with them to this day.

Dig Your Own Hole is an album that can be cut in many different ways, and is packed with stories. Within its opening five tracks alone you can find big beat Chemicals (Block Rockin Beats); 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 arent 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 on this album, as if they had taken everything they achieved on their debut album and rendered it in Technicolor. (via DJ Mag)

Relentless as a bionic metronome, the Chemical Brotherss Dig Your Own Hole burns red raw with the fever of neutron dance. To say its the all-encompassing mother of all album-based electronic pop would be jejuneand idiotic, considering how many great albums came before it, but try telling that to a music press circa 1997 and in the throes of a genuine tizzy.

Album barely has anything to do with the argument, since the disc simmers with the sequencing of a heaven-sent DJ set, and, self-fulfilling single Setting Sun aside, tracks have a way of gaining new elements, shedding musical riffs, and otherwise totally transforming like chameleons before the next silicon index mark. The relay race skid-out of Electrobank slides into a majestic wash of fuzz guitars and sequenced pollen before ramping into the simulacrum-Stax horn hits of Piku, while Dont Stop the Rock begins with assaultive disco octaves before melting into disorienting cymbal rides and asymmetrical 808 claps that ultimately explode into the craggy funk breaks of Get Up on It Like This.

While the album truly doesnt let up until Where Do I Begin? (and even that song concludes with the revving motorcycle borrowed from the introduction to the Gap Bands Burn Rubber), its the one-two punch of Setting Sun (a knowing Beatles homage that renders Dig Your Own Hole an entire albums worth of Tomorrow Never Knows) and It Doesnt Matter that give the landmark rave LP its innovative sense of momentum and rhythm. Its an element that almost no other electronic act, in all their attempts to retrofit their albums with preset dips and valleys, have managed to really master. Those two back-to-back songs, probably the albums most claustrophobic productions, ironically give Dig Your Own Hole album its breath, its sense that there are humans after all behind the electronic curtain. (via Slant)

Label: Freestyle Dust // Virgin
Format: 2 x Vinyl, LP, Album, Reissue, Gatefold
Reissued: 2016 / Originally Released: 1997
Genre: Electronic
Style: Breakbeat, Techno, Big Beat

File under: House / Electro / Techno