Album:    Exit Planet Dust
Artist:   The Chemical Brothers
Label:    Junior Boy's Own (Virgin Records Limited)
Released: 1995-06-26
Summary:  Cut and pasted beats that you can dance to. Good, but not
          great.

The first half of this album is a big blur: there are no individual
songs to speak of, just one long piece of music with several movements,
all mixed in together.  This isn't surprising given that the Chemical
Brothers started out as DJs.  The result consists of heavy beats
that you can't help but dance to, some synthesiser tweaking and lots
of samples.  Even the very first sound on the album is taken from
Kraftwerk's Ohm Sweet Ohm, which is soon joined by a sample from
Blake Baxter's Brothers Gonna Work It Out.

This music, which feels more like a long, improvised jam than anything
else, culminates with Chemical Beats.  With its squeaky acid riff,
it's the classic Chemical Brothers track.  The whole first half of
the album suddenly seems like it has merely been there to lead up
to it.

Once that's over with, the album mellows out for the most part, with
some pleasant tracks to give you a much needed rest.  Even in these
laid back pieces of music, however, the melodies and harmonies still
take a back seat to the beats and the samples.

The two songs present - Life Is Sweet and Alive Alone - provide a
good contrast to the blur of continuous instrumentals, while blending
in with the general aesthetic of the album surprisingly well.

Exit Planet Dust can get a bit too repetitive in places for my liking.
It would probably have been better off without Playground for a
Wedgeless Firm, which is just a looped drumbeat and filter sweep
with and a handful of seemingly unrelated bars of music looped over
the top of it.  It highlights the simplistic overall feel of the
album, sounding like the Chemical Brothers overused the copy and
paste feature of their sequencer.

Overall, this is still a good album, and certainly gets you in the
mood to move your body.  It's by no means a classic, though.
