The Chemical Brothers: Push The Button

Long past their prime as top-of-mind tastemakers, the two dance evangelists in The Chemical Brothers have settled into a comfy twilight marked by self-fulfilling prophecy. They've toyed with their sound ever since defining it, but nearly a decade down the line, The Chemical Brothers always sound like The Chemical Brothers, for better and worse. Such a fate hardly suits the grand ambition that the duo holds dear, but it's still resulted in an impressive string of albums tickled by nostalgia and poked by the prospect, however dim, of breaking really, really big.

Push The Button assumes its place in The Chemical Brothers' ever-reliable discography without trying too hard to please. The lowered-bar stance starts with the first single, "Galvanize," which features rapper Q-Tip—a ubiquitous "guest star" unlikely to raise many brows. He sounds a little awkward and wimpy, but his nasal calls to action gain strength from a big, splashy beat and a portentous Arabic string sample. "The Boxer" follows with a buoyant spell of baggy-panted rave piano and quasi-Neptunes vocals by Charlatans singer Tim Burgess, signaling a sharp change in tone that helps and hinders an album that covers a lot of ground without ever tilling it. Highlight tracks like "Believe" and "Hold Tight London" trade in new swells of wiggly funk and cool conga runs; others, like the chest-pounding hip-hop misstep "Left Right" and the would-be Postal Service song "Close Your Eyes," stick out like sore feet.

The bad or boring tracks should be enough to sink an album, but Push The Button somehow reconciles them near the end, when the cloudy steel-guitar curls and train-track drums in "Marvo Ging" swirl everything that comes before into a glorious square dance around electronica's round pole. It leads into another mesmerizing sendoff in "Surface To Air," which imagines The Strokes asleep in a submarine. But by the actual finish, Push The Button fans out into another strong showing by a duo that's been making stirring outro anthems from day one.