The Chemical Brothers - 'Dig Your Own Hole'
No. 14 in our Top 100 Electronica Albums of the 1990s
It could’ve been one of the biggest letdowns in music history. In 1997, the music industry in the United States was abuzz about “The Next Best Thing” from the UK following the fall of grunge and the growing popularity of rave music showing up in commercials, on college radio, on MTV’s late-night Amp music video show, and on movie soundtracks in everything from Mortal Kombat to Trainspotting. The hopes of every jaded music critic looking for a lens into this nebulous nocturnal netherworld of circuitboard madness rode on the talents of two unassuming blokes in London by way of Manchester: The Chemical Brothers, the architects of rave-rock mayhem.
Would they whiff? Based on the strength of their debut album, 1995’s Exit Planet Dust, most music heads believed Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons would meet the “moment”: “Tom and Ed” were steeped in Haçienda club nights during Britain’s ecstasy romance, the hip hop bravado of the 1980s (they originally named themselves after Beastie Boys producers The Dust Brothers), and the Beatles-soaked rock of their native England. As it were, “the brothers gonna work it out,” was the word.
By 1996, following the bruising and snarling E.P., Loops of Fury, they re-calibrated their sound a bit so it could more easily transfer from the dance floor to radio waves. This meant losing some of the bombastic bass and explosive beats of their early run, epitomized by their second E.P., Fourteenth Century Sky, its title an homage perhaps to their shared love for medieval and renaissance history; it’s calling card was the acid roar meltdown ‘Chemical Beats’ — party-pumping dance music to the core.
“I like noise, feedback, distortion: big, crunchy sounds,” Rowlands explained to Mixmag in 1994. “It’s the same with hip hop. If you listen to someone like Kenny Dope’s hip hop records, the drums are so extreme they sound completely fucked up and distorted. You may think it sounds awful but it didn’t happen on its own: someone had to turn that knob up to eleven. That’s what we like: brash, dirty, fucked up music.”
The Chemical Brothers attitude was perhaps best exhibited on their greatest DJ mix, 1996’s Live At The Social, Volume 1, which ranged through the dub and hip hop of Meat Beat Manifesto and Davy DMX to Crooklyn Clan and Eric B & Rakim, leaping forward, with their bass-dropping, bass-thumping remix of Lionrock’s ‘Packet of Peace,’ backspinning into L.A. breakbeat act Metro’s ‘To A Nation Rockin’’ — the message received way out West — which the b-side to their Block Rockin’ Beats single, ‘Morning Lemon,’ realized with panache, ricocheting and whipsawing.
When the media started buzzing about techno music potentially taking the lead in American popular music culture, along with Underworld and Orbital, the Chems were the most logical choice, their “noise” a potential fit for brash rock youth. Consciously or not, they also carefully tuned their antennae so that “brash, dirty, fucked up music” might go farther afield, smartly dialing back the bass and beats just so. As a result, 1997’s Dig Your Own Hole was intelligent, sharp-shooting “synthetic type of alpha beta psychedelic funkin” music aimed right at the purveyors of cool.*
“Over dinner, two forty-somethings, both bald and somewhat conservative, could be overheard imitating the unique techno sound for their friends,” wrote Tamara Palmer and Todd Roberts for Urb magazine that March, reporting a trending music industry trope rippling through Los Angeles a month before Dig Your Own Hole hit the public: “‘Chkchkchkchkchk,’ one sputtered, recreating the unmistakable rapid fire high hats while his buddy played the derivative acid line ‘Eehoheehoheehoh.’”
The genius of The Chemical Brothers though, was that they had changed the vernacular of that synthetic psychedelic sound by slowing it down, stretching acid into a rollercoaster or snowboard ride through the octaves. With ‘Leave Home,’ the opener to Exit Planet Dust, they had caught rockers’ ears — and offered something far more electric than grunge’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ from just a few years before. Besides, Kurt Cobain was gone. In Nirvana’s place was what sounded like a motorcycle screaming down the open highway, “Eeeeeeeyowwowwwowowww!”
So it’s both not surprising, but also very clever, that Tom and Ed Chemical took that rock guitar-sounding acid howl from ‘Leave Home’ and slowed it down even more, and deconstructed it into something halfway between hip hop and rock and techno. “Back with another one of those block rockin’ beats!” went the first salvo. A simple twanging bass guitar line bent the pop mind into the interminable space of techno, its hilly slip-sliding riffs and squawking artillery blasts bopping the head into rave mania, its breakbeats twirling hips and launching the body into its strobing crossfire.
“Electronica” had arrived. And while the American masses still couldn’t quite get it, not even with The Prodigy’s Fat of the Land two months later, and even less with Roni Size / Reprazent’s Mercury Music Prize-winning drum ‘n’ bass double album New Forms — the seeds had not just been planted, but the weeds whacked and the lawn mowed. So with Daft Punk’s Homework, all of these bands’ spirited efforts sank into the collective psyche, seeping into the skulls of Gen X’ers and Millennials, ready to sprout a thousand EDM festivals and Daft Punk’s triumphant reign ten years onward.
But it was Dig Your Own Hole that cracked the crust of that earth. The album’s title had a both funereal tenor — six feet under graves, its stark black and white cover art a glorious contrast of youth and death — and a gutsy F-you D.I.Y. attitude, as in dig your own foxhole. Was this a war on the past? Or was it flower power for the future? Taking the title from graffiti scrawled on the stone wall outside their Orinoco Studios, where they recorded the album, they were also self-deprecating about it too. “The sheer force of someone going up to the wall and writing that,” Simons told The Face magazine that April, 1997, “for us it’s about freedom, be what you wanna be.”
Back in Europe, for months The Face’s Sylvia Patterson carefully built her cover feature story about their rise, profiling a sharp line between underground and fame, between bravado and humility. “Exactly,” Rowlands echoed Simons about the album’s subversive title. “That might help people with their album review: ‘They certainly have dug it. And it’s six feet deep!’” The stylized photos even cast them as a ghoulish, inky-eyed Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, while she cast their younger years as earnest, studying Chaucer and digging through Manchester’s influential Eastern Bloc Records store, earning them the name along with a third student pal, The Three Blind Mice.
That nerdy aspect of their persona, eyes buried in books, buried in music, is exquisitely mined over and over again by Patterson. She captures it with their ease of embrace in Sweden’s Stockholm, where their heady but raucous music galvanized the city’s university types, trading in beer for pear Schnapps. The discipline of sneaky but transgressive is carried throughout Dig Your Own Hole in the form of tunnels, and yes “holes,” as in ‘Lost in the K-Hole’: for the wily video of their first single ‘Block Rockin’ Beats,’ they appeared in the cavernous arched Camden Stables in north London.
“Tom and Ed are standing at a just-constructed mint-blue bar area, waiting to be filmed,” Patterson documents of their “on-set” escapade following a major camera malfunction and the crowding of extras following a subway tube derailment. “They have been approached for obligatory autograph duties once in five hours. We find them midway through their ‘three-second cameo — three more than the last one!’” they explained to Patterson. “‘We can do this, though, ‘cause that’s all we ever do, stand at the bar with our girlfriends and gossip.’” Once again, a high contrast.
While the album’s first section was a battling bash of drum-kit workouts and aggro funk-rock psychedelia — not for the faint of heart, but for the wicked — the album’s title track, ‘Elektrobank,’ and ‘Piku’ rumbled like a boxer through the wasteland of ‘90s music genres, punching them all apart. Of course, the album’s mid-shiner, the Noel Gallagher-featuring ‘Setting Sun,’ was at once crass and brilliant — Gallagher was open about his acid house days in Manchester, so the chemical marriage of the Brothers with the Oasis brood made perfect sense.
For many, it perhaps made less sense on paper. At least Stateside, most ravers disliked Oasis. But the song itself had a Beatles-esque magic to it, something the Brothers plied more and more over time, beginning with their legendary live mix of ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ — The Beatles classic — to close their shows. ‘Setting Sun’ was equal parts professional rock nostalgia and demented acid hurricane, a compelling ‘60s mirror of the ‘90s, or was it vice versa?
Not ones to hand over the keys, the next stretch of Dig Your Own Hole practically overstated their allegiance to the electronic music tribe. ‘It Doesn’t Matter’ and ‘Don’t Stop the Rock’ sounded like repetitive hard techno taunts at the rock crowd. Perhaps they’re why the album was only going to penetrate so far. It was “too weird” for some, while being played by respected Detroit techno DJs like Carl Craig and Derrick May. It could have all fizzled there as too tripped out — but they saved the best for last.
‘Get Up On It Like This’ whips things into a higher gear, a scratching, wiggling acid funk number built to get the legs jumping again. ‘Lost In The K-Hole’ is the album’s deepest groover, a strutting beauty that floats down underground while its chiming melody circles to the heights in a halo of wonder. Extending their sensitive side, Tom and Ed partner with folk singer Beth Orton on ‘Where Do I Begin’ — its title and lyrics a question of sorts of where “I” end and “you” begin, a fitting metaphor for all the fusion in this alchemical affair. Fittingly, Orton was the folk singer who gave William Orbit’s ambient dance hit ‘Water From A Vine Leaf’ one of electronica’s earliest crossovers. On ‘Where Do I Begin,’ she provided a quiet intimate ballast — an Ouroboros logic.
Which brings us to ‘Private Psychedelic Reel’ — the climactic conclusion to Dig Your Own Hole — perhaps their finest moment. Taking a page from Revolver-era Beatles, it uses sitar and swirling seagull sounds to stirring effect. It’s an epic head trip through rock’s sweaty and sexy heritage, casting a spell in the prog traditions of Yes and Pink Floyd but anchored by rave’s sublime auroras of sonic light, horns calling through the pre-dawn darkness to the rising sun, overwhelming in its glow and earth-shattering in its final projection of the third eye, into a future that takes us back to when the world was young. Watching it unfold in an over-the-top symphony of rock and techno —making love in heaven — one cannot deny the Chemicals delivered the goods.
“Music’s one of the least scientific things,” Simons told The Face, waxing more philosophical about the music. “It’s one of the few things that’s closest to magic, something that’s not really there, that can’t be empirically shown. It’s like being a goalkeeper. If you take away the ball, it’s the most ridiculous thing you can do, pelting yourself on the ground. And without music, look at what you’re doing when you dance — putting yourself in these weird shapes that you never would in real life. I think it’s wonderful. In that way it’s magic.” It was as if they could wake the dead then.
Soon after, bands like U2, Aerosmith and the Rolling Stones were asking Tom and Ed to produce their albums or remix their singles into anthems. But they were not keen to let rock jump onto the techno bandwagon. The Chems were just making good music, with a nod or two to the mainstream. They had made their point: this was where the real music was — in a wide open darkness. “The Next Big Thing” was just a mirage. Because in the hands of the Brothers, rave blazed from the underground.
Track Listing:
1. Block Rockin’ Beats
2. Dig Your Own Hole
3. Elektrobank
4. Piku
5. Setting Sun
6. It Doesn’t Matter
7. Don’t Stop the Rock
8. Get Up On It Like This
9. Lost In The K-Hole
10. Where Do I Begin
11. The Private Psychedelic Reel
*The sample of rapper Keith Murray’s line “Who is this doin’ this synthetic type of alpha beta psychedelic funkin’?” from his ‘This That Shit’ is repeated on ‘Elektrobank,’ the third song on Dig Your Own Hole.