The Chemical Brothers: Come With Us

After serving seven years as heirs to a throne that didn't exist, The Chemical Brothers' Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons have found themselves with little to gain and even less to lose. They made a game of escaping their reputation on 1999's Surrender, an understated rewrite of their big-beat beginnings. But now, after a year given over to the disco decadence of Daft Punk and the gaudy wiggle of Basement Jaxx, the unrealized stars are left without anything to guide them in any particular direction. Such a dilemma may lead to a dispiriting descent into obsolescence, but the duo seems blissfully oblivious of anything so weighty on Come With Us, an album with its head in the clouds and its heart exactly where it should be. The opening title track sounds like a resurrected rave anthem, with squealing-siren rolls and a gorgeous beat swimming in a bath of spangly cymbal splash. One conspicuously absent crash away from big-beat bombast, the rhythm plays like a good-natured taunt, while also setting the tone for The Chemical Brothers' deliverance into the nuanced world of texture and mood over beats and breaks. Sequenced into a masterful mix, the album wraps every song into a smiley-faced hug, doling out tingly narcotic massage and aquatic release in even its dustiest moments. Otherwise-underwhelming singles—the Planet Rock relic "It Began In Afrika" and the filter-house sunburst "Star Guitar"—find firmer footing in their new sky-sailing context. The same goes for the album's two vocal tracks. "The State We're In," built around Beth Orton's doleful croon, makes for a thuddingly slow interruption before locking fingers with the glossy trance of "Denmark." Elsewhere, The Verve's Richard Ashcroft sings bloated lines about breaking waves on "The Test," a song that could only work as the anthemic outro to an album whose headiest sentiment measures in with "You should feel what I feel / You should take what I take." Taken whole, Come With Us shows The Chemical Brothers refreshingly unburdened by the self-conscious climate of the dance world, reasserting its brilliance in the most fleeting and inconsequential ways.