Purveyors of extraordinary energy and euphoria, Underworld never miss a beat. The new album – 30 years on from their debut, and their exposure in Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting – once again features music that will always be better live, in the midst of a bouncing throng, ablaze with smiles of joy, than on the best stereo at home, or state-of-the-heart cordless headphones.
Karl Hyde and Rick Smith recommend that listeners avoid shuffle mode, as this new offering is programmed as a sequence, raising a storm, driven by the electronic bass drum, pulsating synths and Underworld’s trademark ethereal vocals, and then taking a few steps back for tracks that are more meditative, but prepare the ground for yet another tidal wave of sound.
After a dreamy opener, “Black Poppies”, the party begins with a series of tracks that launch the fun. Starting with “Denver Luna”, reminiscent of the classic “Born Slippy”, playing on word-repetition and a kind of robotic stuttering – the duo’s trademark vocal style. The pace doesn’t let up with the tracks that follow – “Techno Shinkansen” and "and the colour red”. “Sweet Lands Experience”, still an upbeat track is a little gentler. It’s hard not to feel all the streams of influence that have gone into Underworld’s quintessentially British music. No affectations of mid-Atlantic hipness, but something that reaches back to the crazed musings of Pink Floyd – music that was as connected to chemically induced altered states as Hyde and Smith conjure.
This music sets up the release of collective partying, a shared dream expressed in moments of transcendence and unadulterated happiness. There is something beautifully child-like about Underworld’s music – as if getting out of your head was in many ways a return to innocence.
They know a thing or two about drama on the dance floor: there is a moment midway through “Lewis in Pomona” when the dreaminess suddenly gives way to spikey and irresistible percussion, a feast of syncopation from synthesised kick-drum blurred with the sound of a snare, and hi-hat cymbal. It’s like a door opening, to a further level of surrender. And the party must go on – “Hilo Sky” that follows on, as anthemic as it gets, guaranteed to get a crowd celebrating the beat and the joy of being together.
Then the music gradually quietens down, with less predictable Underworld fare: including “Ottavia”, a bewitching track for Hyde and Smith, with a spoken word vocal from Rick Smith's daughter, mezzo-soprano Esme Bronwen-Smith, written by her and based on an aria from an opera by Monteverdi. She also co-produced the album, which may account for the welcome off-piste quirkiness of some tracks, with the less obviously innocent “Iron Bones” contributed by the highly original LA singer-songwriter Nina Nastasia. The roller-coaster ride ends with a chilled guitar duo, as magical as anything else on the album, but meditative and in a very different key.
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