The Chemical Brothers - No Geography

The Quietus

Seven No.1 albums. That’s not fucking about, is it? The breaks between releases may get longer but the drive and enthusiasm has never let up. Not particularly an outfit to look back and dine on their past, No Geography actually sees the Chems revisiting some of the elderly equipment they used to come up with their first two albums, and creating a studio within a studio with the intent of making the old gear sing again. The results are funkier, spikier, more percussive and more doof than ever before.

Bypassing the ‘star’ names who’ve guested before, No Geography features Japanese rapper Nene on 'Eve of Destruction' and Norwegian singer/songwriter AURORA contributing vocals to several other tracks such as 'Bango' and 'The Universe Sent Me', somehow at times fighting, harnessing and often cheerleading the noise.

Featuring tracks road-tested over the last year or so in DJ sets and some of their biggest live shows yet, such as the heady 'Free Yourself' hooked around samples from the late ’60s experimental Dial-A-Poem project, MAH’s key refrain becoming a looped earworm whenever you see what the binfire that the outside world is up to, and the sheer joyous boogie abandon of 'Got to Keep On' – all working and blending magnificently with the ‘oldies’ into the set. You know that tracks such as the joyous acid of 'We Got To Try' and the clanking 'Bango' will fit effortlessly in to.

It’s a bold claim to suggest No Geography with its reasonably brief (for them) 46 minutes is up there with the controlled chaos and warped psychedelia of their earlier work, but it is. With its unifying themes of freedom, unity and attack, channelled via the medium of boom and sirens, it really is. After the best part of 30 years, there’s still no one else like them. Amazing.

No Geography by The Chemical Brothers is available now

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Pitchfork 80

Blending psychedelic sensory overload with riotous club bangers, the shape-shifting electronic duo’s ninth album is their most entertaining in years.

The Guardian 80

(Virgin EMI)

Three decades after they emerged – along with Underworld, Orbital and the Prodigy – as field-filling dance-music big beasts, Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons’s ninth album journeys back to the source. During recording, they built a “studio within a studio”, containing all their old vintage/analogue gear, which had been gathering dust since the 1990s. The idea was presumably that by making music how they used to, they’d rekindle some of the old inspiration and then tweak it for 2019 with the larger studio’s modern tech. Which is pretty much how No Geography sounds.

The Guardian 60

(Virgin EMI)

The conceit of this ninth Chemical Brothers album is a tantalising one: dusting down the kit used on their first two acclaimed albums, Exit Planet Dust (1995) and Dig Your Own Hole (1997). Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons have not just endured but prospered since their heyday by redeploying a familiar bag of signifiers – muscular beats, upfront vocals – to reliable effect.

The sequel to 2015’s late-life flowering, Born in the Echoes, does supply a steady stream of knee-jerk fare. Free Yourself is one effective, but super-obvious, paean to dancing, whose video finds AI robots throwing a warehouse rave. But some of No Geography rewinds the 90s more exactingly.