No Geography

A lot of the Chemical Brothers’ album titles refer to travel or journeys of one sort or another: Exit Planet Dust, Come With Us, Further… No Geography takes that to its logical extreme, especially when paired with the cover image of a tank rolling down a highway in the British countryside, as a face appears in the clouds. Where are they going? Does it matter? The music is some of their most powerful in twenty years, so just take the ride. The beats jolt you to your feet, the melodies — always some of the most riff-based in electronic music, borrowing rock’s sense of dynamics without doing anything as uninspired as sampling “heavy” guitar riffs — are almost convulsively energetic, and the sampled vocals imply song form without ever saying anything definitive; they’re just evocative phrases. It’s the same methodology they’ve explored for decades, but they do it better than ever on this album.