New Track: "Got To Keep On" By Chemical Brothers Will Make You Forget What Decade It Is
Tristan Young @talltristan
In a time when a bizarre amalgamation of country and rap opens up deep fissures about social identity, it’s nice to step back and remember that, hey, The Chemical Brothers are still around! They’ve just released their new album No Geography and it honestly feels like an eternity since the days of ‘Electrobank’ or ‘Setting Sun’. So how has the venerable electronic group changed over the decades? Hard to say if their sound reflects the times, tries to catch up or is simply an expression, as always, of what they wish to produce. What’s more clear is how fun album highlight ‘Got To Keep On’ is. The track is a highway of kinetic energy, streamlined and efficient, with just enough melodic quirks and body rhythm orientations to keep it engaging the whole time. Perpetual cycles of bass notes plod along in perfunctory sequences only from them to quickly stumble along a downward scale at an oddly satisfying tempo. Everything is frantic and linear, like a fire drill in which everyone zippers into one line to get through a door. That is except for this occasional steady procession of big bold marching band style chimes that audaciously do their own thing at their own pace- it sounds awesome. The beat begs for analytical dissection which is a lot of fun, but the vocals operate less on a sensory level and more through primal feeling. As the lyrics would imply, the gospel like chants, “got to keep on making me high”, in their recurrent sequences, bring the song to the dance floor with hypnotic powers of persuasion. The technical attributes to the beat pail to the charismatic calls to simply flail those limbs around, in whatever direction momentum and gravity dictates. An extended break down almost encourages you to shoot over to the bar, grab a drink, and get your ass back on to the floor before it builds to the drop. The machine glitch tension pre drop, that cuts out in perfect synchronization with the returning chimes is a blast. Chemical Brothers may not be the arbiters of modern electronic music, but it’s not clear they ever cared about that sort of thing anyway. That makes ‘Got To Keep On’ such a pleasant refrain from the hell scape that is whatever year it is now.