The Singles Jukebox

And the feelings go on and on…

[Video]
[6.86]

Thomas Inskeep: The Chems’ ninth studio album, No Geography, is a goddamn get-on-the-floor rave glory that I didn’t think Tom ‘n Ed still had in ’em, and one of the reasons is “Got to Keep On.” Interpolating Peter Brown’s 1978 disco classic “Dance With Me” (of which I’m a major fan) is a smart and unexpected move, especially the way in which the Chems do it, and they leash said rework to a funky-as-fuck bassline and some interstellar noise. Tonight we’re gonna party like it’s 1994!
[8]

Alfred Soto: Using Peter Brown’s disco chestnut “Dance With Me” will give even Mark Ronson + Lykke Li a B-12 shot of energy. Les frères chimique go one better and attach electro bass. Committed nostalgists who persist in the quaint belief that the dance floor is the utopia we deserve, Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons can do this thing without much fuss. It needs more block rockin’ beats, more originality than exploiting audience memories of a disco chestnut. 
[6]

Ryo Miyauchi: All the Chemical Brothers really had to do was bring another one of those dumb, head-smacking stadium-dance beats, but No Geography also re-examines that nerdy yet slightly macho big-beat they’ve introduced through Dig Your Own Hole more than 20 years ago. “Got to Keep On” in particular works to undo some of the frat-jock cockiness of yore by revisiting and emphasizing the roots to house. The record glides funkier and more gracefully than their usual laser-focused yet stiff grind while the cooing voices fluff the track into an even softer affair. The vocal samples feel arbitrary, favoring feeling over any intent, but the stickiness of the groove makes up for a lack of solid meaning.
[7]

Tim de Reuse: The Chemical Brothers have faltered in the last decade, but they’ve always sounded gorgeous, and so I’ve had a soft spot for them even as they failed over and over again to find a niche for Big Beat in the 2010s. Here we’ve got a detailed, sunny dance tune that takes forever to get back to where it started, with a completely superfluous build that features a quote so embarrassingly dramatic that even the ’90s wouldn’t have accepted it. If you listen real close, you can hear them scraping the bottom of the barrel as they strain to come up with Big Beat-adjacent ideas that anyone in the current year still might want to listen to.
[4]

Scott Mildenhall: The Chemical Brothers show no sign of losing their knack of making Chemical Brothers songs. They float those cooed, elongated vowels on a turntable-burnishing disco inversion, and at once conjure light, shade, intensity and tranquility.
[8]

Kat Stevens: The Chemical Brothers included this dreamy wedding-bell banger in their festival set last summer; its appearance online during a grotty, snotty February put me right back in that field, a slice of sunshine where carefree woodland animals potter about in a glade and nothing bad can happen. Soothing dance music for those of us at an age where it takes 2+ days to recover from a hangover.
[9]

David Moore: I saw the Chemical Brothers at a festival when I was about 16 — during their set, the restless audience, while waiting for Limp Bizkit to go on, stretched out enormous blankets and hoisted crowd-surfers on top and flung them into the air, and I got the courage to hop on myself, and I guess people decided I was the last one who ought to have a turn, or maybe their aim was off, because I fell hard on my back on the ground and got the air knocked out of me and limped back to my friends on the sidelines and my back was pretty messed up for a while afterward, but damn it, I listened to nearly everything the Chemical Brothers put out after that, always thinking of that moment of euphoria and the horrible pain that followed, only to discover just now, in searching that festival for this review, that the act was, in fact, the Crystal Method.
[6]