Pitchfork

Today was the first good rainy day we've had in Minneapolis since early last Spring and the air was all fresh and clean- like. It was also the first official day of Fall. Naturally, I craved my first cup of hot chocolate of the season. So, I walked over to the coffee cafe place down the street and ordered up a mug. I finally sat down with my hot chocolate, ready to relax with a newspaper and get warm.

Well, if there's one thing I always forget about hot chocolate, it's that it's so damned hot. Needless to say, I burned the ass out of my mouth. So, "Okay," I thought. "I'll just wait for a minute and I'll drink the chocolate after it cools off a little." An endless 60 seconds elapsed and I cautiously took my next drink. It turned out that I'd missed that beautiful moment when the hot chocolate is just the right temperature where it won't burn you and it still tastes good. And, man, cold chocolate sucks.

Remarkably, I experienced a similar disappointment upon listening to the Chemical Brothers' Brothers Gonna Work It Out. After their 1996 breakthrough, Dig Your Own Hole, I expected this new DJ mix to showcase their excellent musical taste, present a bunch of great, obscure old songs culled from their massive vinyl collections, and demonstrate their abilities on the wheels of steel. I had highly anticipated its arrival.

Brothers Gonna Work It Out is a mix of some decent electronic and funk numbers, but it's a far cry from Portishead DJ Andy Smith's The Document, an album of a similar nature. The Brothers splice together tracks like Kenny Dope and the Powerhouse Three's funkarific "Makin' A Living," Barry DeVorzon and Perry Botkin Jr's strangely psychedelic "The Riot" and Meat Beat Manifesto's classic "Mars Needs Women." Now, these are all interesting picks to be sure, but many of them are mind- numbingly repetitive, and some of them simply don't belong.

What's even more annoying is that the Brothers toss in two remixes of their originals (Justin Warfield's remix of "Not Another Drugstore" and the Micronauts' "Block Rockin' Beats" mix) and one of their own previously unreleased songs ("Morning Lemon"). And they actually had the gall the close out the album with completely out- of- place remixes they've done of the Manic Street Preachers' "Everything Must Go" and Spiritualized's "I Think I'm In Love."

So, yes. Not unlike this afternoon's bout with the hot chocolate, Brothers Gonna Work It Out is a bit of a disappointment. Luckily, this is just a one- off, and I'm sure we can expect plenty more excellent big beat from them in the future. In the meantime, this record can only go down in history as the Chemical Brothers' equivalent of Paula Abdul's Shut Up And Dance.