![]() A transition has taken place and Underworld has apparently now moved on from dance music, a move many expected them to take when their significantly younger collaborator Darren Emerson left the band in 2000.Īs for maintaining the stasis of their heretofore dependable career, only “Ring Road” really upsets the apple cart, but no more than did “Bruce Lee” on Beaucoup Fish. But the more one listens to Oblivion, the more the fatalism of their song titles becomes apparent. Underworld has been working at it for five years, and its string of internet-only EPs are peppered with evidence that the band can still turn up the adrenaline: the live EP Lovely Broken Thing’s opening diptych of “JAL to Tokyo,” a very worthy dirty epic (included as a bonus track on the iTunes version, thankfully), and “Billy Goat,” a pistons-pumping cyclone of synthesized drum riffs, certainly shames “Crocodile”/“Beautiful Burnout” for pogo-sticking momentum. It’s not like there wasn’t material to choose from. On all previous albums, these would form the downtempo middle section before kicking off into something like “Rowla” or “Kittens.” Here, they serve as a kickoff that warms us up for…nothing. The opening one-two of “Crocodile” and “Beautiful Burnout” is completely serviceable, though the overt harmonic complexity of both leans a tad hard on Underworld’s latent prog-rock underpinnings. But the structure of the album reveals the band clearly wrenching themselves away from their debt to dance. The gorgeous, blue ennui that marked the varying tempos of “Mmm…Skyscraper I Love You,” “Pearl’s Girl,” and “Sola Sistim” is still present, perhaps even a bit more pronounced in the aftermath of “Two Months Off” (a blinding wall of sunny synth bliss that I presumed would portend a bright future for vocalist Karl Hyde, post-alcoholism). Unfortunately, Oblivion throws a wrench into that line of thought, though it clearly meshes with their previous incarnations and eventually emerges as a listenable album in its own right (on headphones, naturally). In that sense, I love Underworld the way many cinephiles revere Budd Boetticher, Lamont Johnson, or even Clint Eastwood. Even at their very best (the opening stretch of 1999’s Beaucoup Fish) they may have lacked the showy innovation and raw talent that marked the genre’s “A” benchmarks, but dance music can be a surprisingly conservative genre and good headphone music can sometimes thrive on the sort of even-tempered professionalism that would risk clearing the dance floor. Call them the white, British Masters at Work. nuxx” as an anomalous mega-hit right down the center of that timeline), the boys of Underworld were techno’s supremely dependable “B” students. Praising them for their consistency and self-awareness of their own métier.įrom dubnobasswithmyheadman to A Hundred Days Off (with their characteristic “Born Slippy. Praising them for not embarrassing themselves in the new millennium as the Chemical Brothers, Fatboy Slim, Moby, and especially Prodigy all have. Praising them for keeping a low profile, hunkering down, and turning out unfussy, danceable tributes to digital ennui. Praising them for their reluctance to follow nearly every one of their peers in the 1990s electronica boom in trying to keep their sound fresh with needless intra-genre interpolations. Before I even heard Oblivion with Bells, Underworld’s first album (or their first album available in physical CD form, as opposed to a string of Internet-only releases that led up to this) in five years, I had already planned out a review praising Underworld.
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