In the latest installment of “The Dust Bin” (a long time coming), we revisit one of the finest electronic songs ever written and produced. An aural lotus flower that unfolds to reveal the sublime.
The Chemical Brothers—at once considered one of the most defining artists in electronic music history and, in the current musical landscape, now perhaps the most easily forgotten. The tendency toward the new has a way of discarding the chrysalis, as though in transmogrifying into a butterfly, the Lepidopterologist had forgotten that its subject had once been a caterpillar.
The Chemical Brothers are as essential as Orbital and Underworld. Get a modern bohemian to admit this in conversation and ye shall wait for a succession of eternities to pass. They are no longer hip. Well, fuck hipness and give me something rich and lasting.
I could sit here and consider The Chemical Brothers entire catalogue, and proclaim the various reasons why “We Are The Night” is a spectacular album and, indeed, how the much derided track “The Salmon Dance” is bloody brilliant; however, I only wish to fix my gaze at one song from the debut LP “Exit Planet Dust.”
“One Too Many Mornings.”
One might say that a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Chemical Brothers’ very early days and environs would be nothing so much as an obituary, but I think not. ‘Tis but a fixed point of beauty. Something we can marvel at and which will then function as the vortex that precipitates a return to the duo’s entire oeuvre.
It begins with My Bloody Valentine-esque white noise—a trope that figures in much of The Chemical Brothers’ later recordings. The track superimposes MBV’s sonic whirlwind atop Orbital synthesizer rhythms. This, after all, was only three years removed from MBV’s release of “Loveless,” on which shoegaze was briefly married with dance in the track “Soon.”
In “One Too Many Mornings,” Kevin Shields’ vision is thus fully realized by The Chemical Brothers. Whereas Shields sounded like a man merely experimenting with the beat, The Chemical Brothers—the acknowledged exponents of “big beat”—own the beat. Everything sounds organic and complete.
It is the first total integration of shoegaze and electronic music. The template for everything from Ulrich Schnauss and Chill Wave to Yeasayer and Elite Gymnastics is set.
Perhaps it’s a bit misleading to reference MBV here because the vocals are, in fact, sampled from a 4AD band Swallow—specifically the dub remix of their song “Peek A Boo.” The lyric sampled here and emphasized in the dub remix is “You mean the whole… here.” The presence of Swallow only enhances the dreampop/shoegaze DNA of “One Too Many Mornings.”
It is a monumental track and to hear this dropped on the speakers at a party would be truly mind-altering.
