Chemical Brothers - Exit Planet Dust - 2x LP Vinyl

2024 repress of the 2017 reissue, originally released in 1995 - Audio has been cut from the original lacquers directly from the studio of the original engineer, Mike Marsh, and fully approved by The Chemical Brothers’ Ed Simons and Tom Rowlands.

Exit Planet Dust is a psychedelic rock record, the big instrumental rave-up that, say, the 13th Floor Elevators might’ve made if they’d had access to mid-’90s technology and less-damaging drugs. The drums aren’t nimble house drums; they’re big, gallumphing thunder-bombs, even approaching Bonham territory on “Playground For A Wedgeless Firm.” The bass-tones aren’t computerized rumbles; they sound like someone ran John Entwistle’s axe through a whole pile of fuzz pedals. the synths don’t needle or stab; they riff. There’s a reason why, in an age of producers using non-representational CGI polygons for their cover art, the Chemical Brothers went with an image straight out of Dazed & Confused.

They weren’t making a record for DJs, though a few of the tracks on Exit Planet Dust apparently did get major club play. They were making an album of fired-up stoner music, one that was intended to be received as an album. Album-oriented dance music was a pretty new thing in the mid-’90s; techno was a singles genre. But Exit Planet Dust was a landmark in figuring out how this stuff could play in album form. The structure — bangers up front, woozy pretty music on the second half — pretty much defined the way most people would assemble dance albums for at least the next few years. And maybe that’s why Exit Planet Dust has aged so much better than so many of the albums that came in its wake. There’s no forced crossover, no pay-attention-to-me gimmick. Instead, it maintains and manipulates a mood, and it does it without dissipating into ambience. And on the two tracks that do feature vocals, those vocals serve a purpose. On “Life Is Sweet,” Charlatans UK frontman Tim Burgess taps into a lost-little-kid stumble that unites the Chems with the Charlatans’ Madchester scene and, by extension, the jangled-up ’60s music that inspired the Madchester scene. And on album closer “Alive Alone,” previously-unknown singer-songwriter Beth Orton coos over sitar samples and accesses the starry-eyed longing that Orton was never able to conjure on her own. To this day, I’m mad that we never got a full album of Chems/Beth Orton collabs. They sounded better together than either ever sounded on their own.

Exit Planet Dust was a culturally important album, and an influential one, at least for a while. The combination of rave sirens and psych-rock far-outness was probably what convinced people like Noel Gallagher and Mercury Rev to jump onboard when the Chems made their even-better follow-up album Dig Your Own Hole two years later. And in the second half of the ’90s, spaced-out dance music came to rival Britpop as the dominant sound of young people getting fucked up in the UK, as you’ll hear on the Trainspotting soundtrack. Exit Planet Dust was a big part of that.

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