Chemical Brothers review – a glorious, meaningless sensory overload
In the 90s electronic boom, when the Chemical Brothers, Leftfield, Orbital and the Prodigy formed the “big four” acts making dance music a live experience, occasional festival appearances were the only real opportunities they had to take their music to the masses. Most of their gigs saw audiences crammed into student halls and mid-sized venues. Today, as live music has exploded along with bigger, visuals-friendly venues and the band’s influence (this week they were nominated for three Grammy awards), the Chems have made the step into arenas, where they can showcase their electric dreams on the scale they’ve long imagined.
At first, the opening night of their first regional tour in 20 years feels like an old-school rave. Some people have exhumed their 90s bucket hats – once popularised by Stone Roses drummer Reni. Others in the balconies are constantly up and in the aisles all night, giving security staff a headache. Meanwhile, DJs play vintage dance tracks before the main act come on. LFO’s thumping sub-bass workout of the same name, once popularised in nearby Leeds Warehouse, gets rapturous cheers of recognition.
When they do, the gig doesn’t feel like a dance music show at all. With their dazzling computer graphics, watching the Chemical Brothers nowadays has become more like a film set to pulverising but textured music. Funky opener Go is illustrated by giant athletes and Free Yourself is appropriately accompanied by a succession of images of a human dancer trapped in boxes, baths, chairs, even claustrophobically wrapped in wire.
Below all this, Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons are almost a parody of the old criticism that live dance acts are just anonymous knob-twiddling blokes.
Some of the time, Simons isn’t even doing that – he wanders the stage, away from his equipment, pausing to punch the air. Mostly they’re all but shrouded in darkness, but it doesn’t matter. The visuals – lasers, walls of strobes and at one point gigantic moving robots – put the show on for them.
Bravely for a vintage act, the set mostly shuns safe old bangers in favour of material from this year’s Top 5 album No Geography, which saw the pair return to their old analogue synths and 90s working methods, but which doesn’t sound retro so much as timelessly them. Got to Keep On (“making you high”), heralded by the arrival of giant disco balls, is an early highlight.
They sprinkle in the older hits. A vocal sample from New Order’s Temptation introduces Star Guitar, a track audibly influenced by the Manchester band. Their 1999 hit Hey Boy Hey Girl still captures its era. Galvanize and No 1 hit Block Rockin’ Beats create instant euphoria. Everything’s delivered in a seamless stream – there is literally a second’s pause somewhere in the middle – until the duo finally disappear.
The house lights stay down, they return and The Private Psychedelic Reel plays out with snippets of the Rolling Stones’ Sympathy for the Devil and medieval images of devils and angels.
Eve of Destruction’s earlier, presumably anti-nuclear sentiments aside, they don’t use the format’s potential for any grand political or environmental statements and it’s hard not to wonder what it all means. The answer – signalled in a graphic that reads Don’t Think, Let It Flow – is absolutely nothing. It’s just an extraordinary multisensorial experience.
• At SSE Hydro, Glasgow, 23 November, then touring.