Reviews of Many Underworld Albums

Welcome to my compilations of reviews for Underworld albums

Reivews for: Beaucoup Fish

Review from CD-Now

Since forming in Romford, England, at the end of the 1980s, Underworld has been regarded as one of the top two or three acts on the electronic scene by the small, devout following of the genre.

That recognition spread in 1996 with the brilliant, high-energy single "Born Slippy," which became a hit after it was prominently featured in the film Trainspotting.

Thanks in part to the success of that song, the band's third release, Beaucoup Fish, has been the most highly anticipated electronic release of the year.

Artistically, Beaucoup Fish lives up to its advance billing, crisscrossing the genres of rock, techno, ambient, disco and jazz to create a rich, multi-leveled listening experience.

The disc kicks off with the nearly 12-minute long "Cups," a pure techno track with elements of disco layered in the seductive droning of the restrained bass line and hypnotic keyboards.

There is no one song here as infectious or bubbly as "Born Slippy," though "Shudder/King of Snake," with its frenetic grooves over a sampling of Donna Summer's "I Feel Love," perhaps comes closest. The album's highlight is the hyper-kinetic closer, "Moaner," with a Bono-like vocal narrative and a feverish arrangement that teeters on the edge of explosion with a drama not unlike the Doors.

That there would be U2 influences on Beaucoup Fish is appropriate, as Underworld, like U2, demonstrates an artistic vision, coupled with integrity, that transcends genres and places Underworld among the elite of today's musical hierarchy, regardless of genre.

Steve Baltin

Exclusive Review from Rolling Stone

Underworld contentedly played to a cult audience for years, until 1996, when they found themselves on the hit Trainspotting soundtrack exactly at the point when the genre they'd been working in for most of their lives was suddenly proclaimed the next big thing. Before the Brit techno trio could get its next album out, the American media had deemed that genre -- electronica -- a non-happening, yet they still looked to Underworld to prove them wrong.

With Beaucoup Fish, Karl Hyde, Rick Smith and Darren Emerson do what they probably would have done had none of the ups and downs ever happened -- create darkly physical grooves that seduce psyche, body and soul without resorting to instant hooks or easily understood concepts. There is no ready-made "Born Slippy," the single that graced a thousand quickie electronica compilations in the wake of Trainspotting. Nor do Underworld undertake a radical stylistic switcheroo to compete with this moment's big-beat boys. Their specialty is an undulating trance throb that shimmers with shades of rock, contemporary symphonics, dub, disco, house, spoken word, whatever. The result still sounds like Underworld, and the fiftieth play sounds better than the fifth.

The epic opener, "Cups," evokes Herbie Hancock's Seventies vocoder jazz, with sweetly distorted vocals sprinkled across shifting slabs of slinky rhythm, ever-changing repetition and much-understated drama. Archetypal for Underworld but unlike typical club fare, the track doesn't end the same way it starts -- there's a musical narrative here, even if it's incomprehensible to all but your feet. The first single, "Push Upstairs," layers an angular piano riff, a stuttering bass boom, Hyde's drawling rant and cinematic suspense. Later, "Push Downstairs" floats similar poetry over a languid ambient pool. If there's a future dance classic here, it's "King of Snake," which subverts the famous spiraling synth flow of Donna Summer's epochal "I Feel Love" with clattering snares and splattering echo frenzy. Will it pull Underworld over-ground? The answer could be in the next big soundtrack. (RS 811)

BARRY WALTERS

Exclusive Review from Vh1

Underworld's groove "Born Slippy" was originally a B-side thrown onto the end of the film Trainspotting. "Slippy's" profound melancholia gave way to a piling adrenaline rush of drums and a mad yammering singer. It sounded like nothing anyone had ever heard, and marked the band as one to watch. Beaucoup Fish, filled with heavy Detroit grooves and Hyde's ability to put a nonsense lyric in just the right place, fulfils the promise.

Underworld doesn't really create tracks, but sculpture. Like the distended orb on the cover of their album, the music itself is a thing of smooth, washed-over surfaces and bloated percussion. There is always a monumental quality to Fish, created through echo and Hyde's diary-like ruminations. With most tracks clocking in at over six-minutes, it's impossible to consider the music without confronting its construction. It's an album which, rather than trying to recreate the disco-sexcity-b.p.m.-chaos rush of a nightclub, forces the listener to get inside each track and boggle at its transformative power. So put Fish proudly on your stereo and allow it to effect the balance of your living space. Pernicious, maybe, but this is the future. And it would be a shame not to enjoy it.

C. Bottomley

Reviews of: dubnobasswithmyheadman

Exclusive Review from CMJ New Music

Before Underworld discovered that ecstasy and sedatives can mix (at least sonically), the band was playing mid-'80s technopop and calling itself Freur. But aside from "Doot Doot," the band (which then consisted of Karl Hyde and Rick Smith) remained relatively unknown. Changing its name to Underworld didn't help for two albums, but with the recent addition of DJ Darren Emerson, Underworld has updated and overhauled its sound, making it one of the most exciting dance bands to emerge this year, The release of Dubnobasswithmyheadman (and a few side-project singles under the moniker Lemon Interrupt) skyrocketed the group to European stardom last year, and now that the record's out domestically, American listeners who've spent all their money on psychoactive substances and lack the funds to purchase import releases can tune into Underworld's groovin' psychedelic soundgrids. Unlike the many closed-minded dance bands that operate like exclusive clubs, allowing only members with the right musical backgrounds into their sonic parties, Underworld has an open door policy, inviting everybody to dive into the band's cosmic, mind-altering melodies. Dubnobass... is rooted in a range of electronic styles including trance, techno and house, but it also melds elements of rock and pop (included sedated vocals and mindbending melodies) into its stellar constructs, "Tongue" even sounds like Spacemen 3. Closeyoureyesandflyaway.

Jon Wiederhorn

Exclusive Review from CMJ New Music Report

A dance trio which poses with guitars; a dance trio which plays wholly live (yes, without DAT back-up); a dance trio which incorporates rock/pop boundaries. What's going on? Having mutated from New Romantic eccentrics Freur (a cult hit with "Doot Doot"), a seven-piece, funk-driven Underworld released two (ignored) albums on Sire in the mid-to-late `80s, but this is phoenix-from-the-fire material. The difference between then and now is the 3-D presence of cutting-edge DJ Darren Emerson, who joins Karl Hyde and Rick Smith in a head-on clash between dance music and rock/pop song culture resulting in Dubnobasswithmyheadman, an endlessly open, fascinating hybrid that is fast becoming a seminal recording. U.K. trance, Belgian techno and Italian house motifs link arms with ambient, dub, Kraftwerkian and synth-pop textures, laced with elegant guitar latticework, computer wizardry and provoking lyrics in a beautifully seamless package. Eight tracks and 72 minutes provide acres of space to explore, so each track is like a tiny labyrinth, leading you through striking, undulating territory, with several breathtaking vistas, especially "Dirty Epic," where the commercial warmth of the Stereo MC's' "Connected" is expounded into a cinemascope, and "Cowgirl," whose murderous wall-of-techno drive matches 1993's epic single "Rez." Other highlights include the monstrous but never gratuitous 13 minute "Mmm...Skyscraper I Love You," where Hyde's cut-up/collage lyricism goes haywire, the vocoder vox and trippy sequencer swing of "Spoonman" and the slowmelting "Tongue." Melody Maker has called the album "the greatest record ever" (the drugs, the drugs!), but you can understand the enthusiasm: with Dubnobasswithmyheadman, true club culture finally rises from underworld to overground, with `band' and `album' status intact. You could even say the future starts here.

Exclusive Review from CMJ New Music Report

Underworld is a long-lived pop group that discovered techno and hooked up with a young Di, but that's not what Dubnobass... sounds like. It sounds like a great, versatile techno group tenderly but surefootedly exploring rock for the first time, and taking what it likes from the world of silicon-free pop (singing, spontaneity, harmonic variation, even a guitar or two) to use for its own purposes. Underworld snaps its songs into their component fragments, then reassembles them into drawn-out techno structures (the tracks here average eight minutes), with swatches of dub echoes and Karl Hyde's softly-sung melodies fluttering from the joints. The music never you expect it to: the behaves quite the way pungent, rapid-fire sequencer lead in the middle of the distorted softcore-techno "Cowgirl" sounds like a Robert Quine or Adrian Belew guitar blast, while the gentle guitar chording that sustains "Tongue" is both prickly and lulling at once in the same way as the Orb or Orbital can be. There's tremendous stylistic diversity here, too. Underworld draws on multiple techno traditions, sometimes in the course of a single song, and the tricks it's picked up from rock keep each song interesting in itself and distinct from its neighbors. Check out "Mmm Skyscraper I Love You," "Spoonman" and "Dirty Epic."

Douglas Wolk

n Reviews of: Second Toughest of the Infants

Exclusive Review from CMJ New Music

"`Air Towel,' what did I sing on that one?" Underworld's singer/guitarist Kurt Hyde ponders. "Christ, I just got off tour, I should know this. It's the one with me singing with a vocoder." I thought that was `Juanita"? "Yeah, that too." Back up. "Right, the second track is `Banstyle,' which goes into `Sappys Curry.' `White robe, little engine, fishman I command Hyde sings softly to himself, "or is that `Sappys Curry'?" That doesn't help. The confusion lies in Underworld's new album, Second Toughest In The Infants (Wax Trax!-TVT), listing 10 songs, but tracking only eight. Sorting them out isn't quite as easy as one expects. So let's just say the important thing isn't song titles, but the music. Underworld has had a massive impact on the European club scene with its crossover techno-rock sound, but the way Hyde tells it, it wasn't easy. "Until then, singers and guitars had just pissed all over the heads of these great grooves. The challenge was, how do I exist in this group that chose to make dance records, at a time that it was totally unacceptable? It terrified me. In Britain, in 1990, clubs didn't want music with vocals or guitars. Thus, Hyde, programmer Rick Smith, and DJ Darren Emerson had their work cut out. But Underworld found a workable answer: "Get rid of the ego, get rid of the need to be louder than beats, get rid of that guitar wanking, and then say that everything is an instrument... That's why sometimes you can't hear what I'm singing - that's not relevant. `Does it sound great?' "But that was the easy part. The real challenge was: How do you write songs that aren't verse, chorus, verse, songs that are driven entirely by the groove and where it wants to go? That's why our songs take the form that they do." The goal is to not "tread on the groove," and also to introduce the traditional elements of rock in a different way. Thus, the guitar's role is abstruse but important; like Hyde's vocals, it contributes both sonic power and mood to the songs. His lyrics, similarly, are thought fragments, seemingly connected, but how? "A lot of the lyrics are totally autobiographical from me being in a place, overhearing conversations, looking around and seeing things... Until you know I really was on the midnight train from Romford, or that `Pearl's Girl' was written after a couple of bottles of riacha, wandering through the night, seeing all this stuff... Some of it's word association." Which doesn't clarify the song titles in the least. "Quite a few of our tracks are names of greyhounds, because we go to the dogtrack occasionally. We just leave the racebook on the desk, and when we need a title sometimes we just pick. `Born Slippy,' `Sappys Curry' and `Pearl's Girl' were all dogs."

JOANN GREENE

Exclusive Review from CMJ New Music Report

Underworld is a pop group first and a techno project second - it just doesn't necessarily sound that way. But ever since the members were in Freur in the early `80s, they've been finding spaces in the matrices of dance-music conventions to slip in vocals and guitar-playing. As those conventions have gotten more expansive, it's gotten easier to conceal the songs, but they're in there. The inexplicably-titled Second Toughest In The Infants takes 1993's "Dirty Epic" as the springboard for its very long pieces (the first two are over 15 minutes apiece), whose textures change continuously but subtly - the point is not the destination but the ride. Although all the tracks work like instrumentals, only two of them actually are: "Rowla," an acid-house-styled single-riff electronic workout, and "Blueski," which applies techno repetition-and-development strategies to a little guitar phrase. They've also embraced newer dance ideas, from minimal electro tracks ("Confusion The Waitress," with its merciless single bass note) to jungle - "Pearls Girl" has some serious breakbeats, and "Banstyle/Sappys Curry" tones jungle's barrage down to a sensuous skitter adding a fragile melody and some muted, tasteful guitar. Tougher than tough: the above, plus "Juanita" and the Disco Inferno-ish "Stagger."

DOUGLAS WOLK

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