For That Beautiful Feeling by The Chemical Brothers

The Bacon Review has been a fan of Ed Simons and Tom Rowlands’ big-beat electronica outfit The Chemical Brothers for a very very long long time. Their stellar debut album, Exit Planet Dust, came out in 1995, and I loved it and their subsequent releases (1997’s Dig Your Own Hole and 1999’s Surrender). You might think music that resonated with someone in the heart of their 20s youth may no longer relate to the nearly-50-year-old father of two he has become in the subsequent decades, but you’d be very wrong. Granted, the six albums that came out between 1999 and 2019 didn’t land as squarely in my day-to-day listening. But there’s something about the band’s stellar tenth album, For That Beautiful Feeling, that hits different.

This is the Chemical Brothers back in their 1990s glory. Intense bass beats, sampled and repeated vocals about love and life, big sweeping crescendos that take over your body no matter where you are when you hear them — what you remember most about the band is all mostly there. The only real difference is the Beth Orton and Noel Gallagher cameos have been replaced by the French singer/songwriter Halo Maud and everywhere-man Beck.

The band has released a handful of videos from the album:

The above “Live Again” features a dancer stuck in a loop, continually stepping out of her trailer into an ever-changing landscape, brought on by some barely-scene tentacle-laden alien.
No Reason is a great song shown to the green-screen escapades of a dancing marching band
Goodbye features a colorful couple in love
Skipping Like a Stone ft. Beck is the most ambitious video, but takes the idea of a skipped stone with a hero complex to its illogical extreme.

If you liked The Chemical Brothers back in the day, and if your ears can still hear and your body can still move, then you should definitely check out Feeling. And if the band is new to you, give it a listen to hear what people were dancing to 30 years ago. I’m genuinely curious to hear a current 20-something’s take on the style of dance music that was created 10 years before they were born. Beyoncé, with her most recent house-driven masterpiece, RENNAISANCE (#2 just last year), and others have been giving everyone a taste of what 90s dance music was like. The Chemical Brothers were one of the originators. It’s time for us all to get re-educated.