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“Setting Sun” – The Chemical Brothers with Noel Gallagher
(Words/music: Noel Gallagher, Tom Rowlands, and Ed Simons, available on Dig Your Own Hole, Astralwerks 1996)
Even Oasis apologists won’t deny the Gallagher brothers’ overt Beatles’ emulations, and if they lifted a few moves from the Beatles, then Noel certainly took notes on “Tomorrow Never Knows” before making “Setting Sun” with the Chemical Brothers. The Beatles’ track stands as one of the band’s most experimental moments, including the birth of automatic doubletracking, alternate vocal amplification methods, and a backwards, pitch-shifted guitar solo among others (Wikipedia’s entry on the song goes into future detail for you gearheads). Gallagher and the Chemical Brothers used a lot of these techniques for similar effects. They even use a dramatically similar beat as the basis of “Setting Sun.”
Even with shared pieces, the final puzzles differ in both tone and purpose. The Beatles track, largely composed by John Lennon (McCartney brought the tape loops and Ringo accidentally titled it), grew out of an experience with LSD and draws on the “mind expanding” qualities the drug purportedly offers. It’s somewhere between a hallucination and a meditation. Conversely, “Setting Sun” attacks intensely with the abrupt shifts and jarring sounds. Perhaps it’s an easy association, but hallucinogenics in the 1990s were often associated with these intense, rave-like situations rather than the meditative, mind-expanding experiments in the 1960s. Appropriately, Gallagher’s lyrics flirt with danger and seduction, as they could either be a vague come-on to someone in a dance club or merely a flirtation with some kind of social taboo. Either way, it offered Gallagher the opportunity to create something more intense than his day job while also offering the Chemical Brothers the opportunity to align their big beat sound with a historical musical thread.More on The Chemical Brothers: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm
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