- Record Label: Astralwerks / EMI / Virgin
- Release Date: Jul 17, 2015
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MagnetAug 12, 2015The Chems remain committed to their singular vision, still plying those swooning synths, continuing to breathe new life from the echoes. [No. 123, p.55]
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Jul 27, 2015Into this fray step the Chemical Brothers, 90s dance music titans, with their eighth studio album, their most enjoyable in years.
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Jul 20, 2015Born in the Echoes is an excellent mash of familiar and vanguard, the very same formula that lifts all the duo's best albums above expectations.
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Jul 20, 2015The Chemical Brothers continue to buck any notions of a creative burn-out with their strongest release in a decade.
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Jul 17, 2015Born In The Echoes is another example of Rowlands and Simons' magic way of making machines sing.
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Jul 17, 2015Born in the Echoes has five voices, but it is The Chemical Brothers' borrowing of landmark sounds from their own library that is the album's biggest strength.
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Jul 17, 2015As so often before, the duo’s choice of vocal collaborators is timely and transformative, bringing fresh, unexpected angles to their pieces.
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Jul 16, 2015The veteran duo and its guests are challenging and provocative throughout Born in the Echoes, even as they creatively blow up dance floors.
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Jul 13, 2015At its best, Born in the Echoes is gloriously disorienting, restoring a woozy mania to a genre in danger of self-combusting in search of ever more euphoric pop highs. The kids will probably look on aghast. But old ravers will find themselves transported back to a time when electronica really did sound like the future.
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Jul 10, 2015Born In The Echoes finds them capturing the most elusive sound of all. They sound, at last, like themselves again. [Aug 2015, p.90]
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Jul 10, 2015Born In The Echoes is a bold reinvention of the Chemical Brothers’ sound, pushing the late-period renaissance that 'Further' heralded to somewhere dark and twisted.
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Jul 15, 2015Echoes is more of a grab bag: Enormous festival fillers and hard-nosed club bangers rub up against wondrously bizarre studio experiments and some of the best pure pop songs Rowlands and Simons have ever made.
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Jul 13, 2015Born in the Echoes is a pretty spry record for a few old pros, but the Brothers save their most arresting moment for last.
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Aug 12, 2015Born In the Echoes maintains a pop-sensitive groove for all but two of its songs.... But the real winners on this record as usual are the curios.
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Aug 3, 2015Born In The Echoes does not reveal anything startlingly new about The Chemical Brothers, but it is more than them simply ticking over, and clearly they have an eye on the future.
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Jul 24, 2015Tracks [like “Just Bang” and “Reflexion”] that, while groovy and undeniably fun, ultimately feel as stripped away and shallow as the modern pop-electronic sounds the Chemical Brothers’ actively avoid. Luckily, this doesn’t prevent Born in the Echoes from feeling like a well-rounded record.
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Jul 20, 2015At this point, the Brothers are effectively historians, and the album's most thrilling moments are often references to their own past or inspirations.
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Jul 20, 2015Born In The Echoes continues their fusing of psychedelic head music with the dancefloor, and while it doesn’t break new ground, it’s a timely smack on the nose to the pretenders to their throne.
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Aug 18, 2015Born In The Echoes follows the duo's formula of saving the more psychedelic tracks for the end.
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Jul 20, 2015Born in the Echoes isn’t the sound of stagnation, nor the grim realisation of irrelevance, and there are numerous flourishes that can only come from a knowing skill set, but in the end, it’s only just good enough.
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Jul 17, 2015The latest from the U.K. duo hits harder and lower than their last album, 2010's Further, with guest-vocal turns from artists as varied as Q-Tip and St. Vincent over tracks that could've torched an outdoor rave in 1995.
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Jul 17, 2015Misfires aside, it’s tough to dispute that although Born in the Echoes may not be a great album, it is generally a competent one.
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Jul 15, 2015Among the paint-by-numbers tracks, Born In The Echoes has still got a couple of artful numbers peppered throughout.
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Jul 14, 2015Born in the Echoes is frontloaded with star power, and so it comes as a slowly dawning relief that that album isn't the Chems' Random Access Memories, but rather an attempt to strip away the detritus of the now and play to their own strengths.
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Q MagazineJul 10, 2015Mostly Born In the Echoes is a blast. It's just that sometimes it's a blast from the past. [Aug 2015, p.108]
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UncutJul 10, 2015Born In The Echoes feels a bit Chemical Brothers by numbers. [Aug 2015, p.72]
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Jul 30, 2015A sense of mood or inner life is glimpsed. But by that point [the final third of the album], it just seems like an echo of past glories.
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Jul 23, 2015The dance duo extend the decade-long dilution of their canon with their new record, which is as technically accomplished as ever, but creatively exhausted.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 31 out of 49
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Mixed: 12 out of 49
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Negative: 6 out of 49
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Jul 18, 2015
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Jul 17, 2015
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Jul 17, 2015