True, England’s Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons continue to revel in the artificial sounds and textures of the Chemical Brothers’ high-energy 1997 hit album “Dig Your Own Hole”: wheeps and shimmers, rubbery flatulences, burry buzzes, caldronlike bubblings. But this is a subtler, moodier, sweeter, funkier record, less in-your-face, more in-your-heart. Even the dance instrumentals are booty shakers, not bone crunchers. Noel Gallagher of Oasis returns for another guest vocal, but Mazzy Star’s Hope Sandoval steals the show on the drowsy, sexy, depressive “Asleep From Day”: she sounds as if she’s melting, yet in absolute control.
New York rave deejay and remixer Richard (Moby) Hall startled his techno-purist fans by playing rock guitar on his 1996 CD “Animal Rights.” “Play” shows a still more eclectic sensibility: he’s a roots rocker, a futurist visionary–and a Christian. On “Honey,” he samples and loops a chorus from an old Alan Lomax field recording, adds a drum track, then a tension-building sequence of piano chords. “Run On” samples a 1943 version of the cautionary gospel classic “Run On for a Long Time”; it’s less an act of appropriation than of time-travel collaboration, with slide guitar, turntable scratches, creepy piano and sad, eerie strings. Only musicians and techies (a fast-disappearing distinction) will know how it works–and God only knows why it works. But you don’t have to be a club kid or know the rock-crit lingo for it to work on you.
