Consumer Guide Album

The Chemical Brothers: Exit Planet Dust [Astralwerks, 1995]
They won't convert you because their main interest is pleasing you--pleasing anybody who's both open-minded enough to conceive techno as a bright sun in the rock cosmos and well-adjusted enough not to start star wars over it. Starts out whomping irrepressibly, ends up schlocking imperturbably, and either way provides the noise, beats, and basslines us earthlings like in our electrically enhanced popular music. Means nothing--except that pleasure is a function of somatic and cultural givens less malleable than mutants have always claimed. A−