Sitting in the gutter screaming symphony

Continuing my trip back through the 1999 album charts.

18/07/99 : Surrender - The Chemical Brothers

The Chemicals are one of those dance acts I have a soft spot for and I've got a couple of their albums, including this one - 9/24.  I can't say I listen to it often, but every so often a track or two will be given a spin for a nostalgic hit, so I'm looking forward to catching up on this.

Yeah, it was fun, particularly because (I think) this album contains their best tracks - "Music:Response", "Out Of Control", "Hey Boy Hey Girl" and (for me) their absolute pinnacle "Let Forever Be", which also has one of the best ever pop videos.  The rest of the album offers a reasonable amount of variety and whilst it certainly isn't quite as memorable, it's being compared against a high bar and it's still pretty damn good, but maybe just not quite as damn good as those tracks.

We're at #7 in the charts this week on their fourth week of a 21 week run, having debuted at #1 - which feels relatively ungenerous until you see it took two weeks off and came back for a 26 week run.  The top five this week were the familiar cast of Boyzone, Shania, Ricky, Whitney and ABBA Gold with the highest new entry being Belle and Sebastian's Tigermilk (#13 - and I really should listen to that album some day).

Wikipedia doesn't have a great deal on the album - it was their third album, showing more variety than their previous two and using more guest vocalists with Bernard Sumner, Bobby Gillespie, Noel Gallagher, Hope Sandoval (Mazzy Star) and Jonathan Donohue (Mercury Rev) all appearing on various tracks (although it doesn't feature Beth Orton, who had appeared on both their previous albums - and if you've ever seen Beth live, this is slightly surprising because she's very much not a Chemicals kinda gal).  The critics liked it and it did well commercially - top ten in plenty of European countries, #32 in the US and selling over two million copies globally.

"Customers also listened to" Underworld (who I think are very under-rated), The Prodigy, Fatboy Slim and Basement Jaxx - all of whom people can be a bit sniffy about but there's a lot to admire across their bodies of work.  As is also the case for The Chemical Brothers - and you'll find a surprisingly large proportion of their best stuff on this album, so if you've not checked it out, can I recommend you do so?

11/07/99 - Best stopped after track one
25/07/99 - Perfectly fine

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