Search - Underworld :: Dubnobasswithmyheadman

The Masterful Music of Madness

Mark Eremite | Seoul, South Korea | 04/18/2007

(5 out of 5 stars)

"For almost twenty years, the British duo of Hyde and Smith have been recording as Underworld. This was their first studio album (made with the collaboration of DJ Emerson, who has since left the group), and it is a synapse-shattering example of pure electronic genius made even more impressive when you consider that its electroclash ingenuity and acid house ambiences are as powerful as anything being made today.



If you wondering what to expect, keep wondering. You can listen to this record over and over again and be surprised every time. The reason that music like this exists is because there are no words to approximate what it means or accomplishes. You could say that some songs flow like the trickle-down perspiration on the walls of unexplored caves ("Dark & Long"), that some of them illustrate the electrochemical hopscotch of viruses invading healthy cells ("Spoonman"), that some of the tunes are the aural equivalent of lazy, Missourian sedimentary fossilization, silt and grit burying half-heard secrets ("River of Bass").



I could point to similar bands, if that would help. Here there is A3's country-wise spiritualism, Morphine's coarse-ground flophouse jazz,

Crystal Method's spirit mixed with Zero 7's laconic mentality. Again, though, this is a case where the whole is much more than the sum of the parts. How to describe the wickedness of "Cowgirl" or the sonorous luminosity of "Surfboy?" Will words do "Mmm Skyscraper I Love You" any justice at all?



Nah. It's enough, I think, to say that this album is an unnerving work of art, an example of electronica that -- like electricity itself -- defies containment, defies shape, defies limitations. It charges the slow, wilful spark of precarious profundity, it rips through the impulse to think and remember, it ignites the vicious and verdant instinct to get up and move. If Cicero was right when he said that "No sane man will dance," then this record should make lunatics of us all.



"

Another classic

N. goodey | new york, USA | 02/20/2007

(5 out of 5 stars)

"the masters of the genre produce something deep and free flowing that still sounds good a decade later"