Surrender – The Chemical Brothers
@BlueHammer85: Did you discover this lot before or after Dylan, The Beatles and Oasis?
When reviewing Leonard Cohen’s
Death of a Ladies’ Man on this thread, I said that I had “utmost respect for anybody who can listen to this more than once. This is anti-music.” Well, I’ve saved myself the bother of thinking too much about what to write here because all of that applies again.
However, unlike Cohen’s effort, there’s no flat, dull singing, no embarrassing and misogynistic lyrics and no awful production! In fact, I even recognised and enjoyed (a relative term, obviously) the song “Let Forever Be”. There were a couple of moments in other song where I found myself thinking “that was a clever change of pace”.
Part of my dislike of this album is the lack of proper instruments and that “human performance element”. It’s undoubtedly a great technical achievement, but technological achievement is good in the space race, medical advances and home entertainment, but not in performance art. Obviously, the music comes first, but as I said before, I have to feel that what I’m listening to is from the artists’ heart and has that sense of a real performance with real instruments. There are the occasional “club” tracks that I like (e.g. the sensational Hey! Douglas track I posted above, or the Masterchef p***take by Swedemason) but the tracks on offer here didn’t hit anything like those heights.
A lot of the songs on this album remind me of the “music” that tossers play at two distinct volumes from their car windows (1. Far too loud and 2. Even louder). I have a thing about that, and I think it’s disrespectful. I’ll admit that that has also coloured my response to this album.
’m fine for people to listen to this in a club or at some festival, but if you want to listen to it outside of that, it should be confined to your headphones where you can’t bother anybody else.
I’m glad that I’ve enjoyed some of Blue Hammer’s other selections – I even gave The Smiths a six. But in this case, it’s better than the Leonard Cohen choice but worse than everything else that’s been nominated, so
3/10 it is.
