Second Toughest in the Infants wasn't actually Underworld's sophomore album, but it was their second full-length since progressive house DJ Darren Emerson joined the core lineup of Rick Smith and Karl Hyde in 1991, transforming them from a mediocre dance-rock duo into one of the most original, acclaimed, and successful electronic groups of the '90s. As with its predecessor, 1994's Dubnobasswithmyheadman, Second Toughest was a critical success as well as a commercial hit, reaching the Top 10 of the U.K. album charts and converting a significant number of American listeners right around the time that "electronica" was being hyped as the next big thing in the United States. In comparison to Dubnobass..., Second Toughest was less club-centric and more diverse in its approach, flirting with drum'n'bass rhythms on a few cuts, experimenting with slide guitar loops on the elegant "Blueski," and slowing to a crawl for its final song, the dreamy "Stagger." The trio proved to be masters of pacing and dynamics, crafting lengthy epics (the album's first two tracks collectively exceed half-an-hour) which excitedly build and release, flowing through vivid melodic themes and interlocking rhythmic patterns, and segueing from intricate breakbeats to calmer, more downtempo passages. The album's multi-part suites also harkened back to another era of "progressive" music, the prog rock of the '70s, and like that period's most popular groups, Underworld made brainy, ambitious, mystical music that was also accessible and listener-friendly. The album also remains remarkable for Hyde's surrealist, cryptic, free-associative lyrics, particularly on stand-out tracks like the choppy, Al Green-referencing single "Pearl's Girl." The album's most ecstatic moment, however, is the buzzing, gleeful "Rowla," which piles on dazzling, distorted synth riffs, hushes down for a bit, and then does it all over again. Second Toughest in the Infants endures as a landmark album, spotlighting Underworld at their creative peak, and remaining an important document of an era when experimental, cerebral electronic dance music received significant mainstream attention.
The departure of Darren Emerson prior to the release of 2002’s A Hundred Days Off album could’ve signaled the beginning of the end for Underworld. While his contributions were undoubtedly essential in galvanizing the group’s genre-defining techno and abstract electronica of the 90’s, Underworld continued on to fully realize its panoramic sonic capabilities in the last decade at the hands of its core duo of Rick Smith and Karl Hyde.Spanning 3 CDs, Anthology is luxurious- capturing glorious pieces from 1994’s Dubnobasswithmyheadman through 2010’s Barking album rendering the previous ‘hits’ collection, 1992-2002, obsolete in the process. CD1 covers the sacred early territory including the brooding “Mmm, Skyscraper I Love You,” the punishing “Cowgirl,” the mournful “Dirty Epic,” and “Dark and Long (Dark Train)”- the quintessential archetype for the techno genre.
CD2 opens with many people’s gateway track to the band: the crushing 1996 juggernaut that is “Born Slippy.” 1999’s Beaucoup Fish album had the unenviable task of following up the Trainspotting centerpiece and is represented by “Jumbo” and the manic freight train “Moaner.” “Push Upstairs” and especially “Shudder: King of Snake” are more than deserving representations of this underrated album yet they are omitted. “Two Months Off” may be the group’s single most important track as it urgently, joyously declares with soaring harmonies and cascading, sun-drenched synths that Smith and Hyde would be just fine a duo. “To Heal” is a symphonic masterpiece which crystallizes the warmth and humanity that has pervaded Underworld’s post-Emerson works. “Scribble” is a surprising selection from the Barking album that also features the slow simmering Dubfire co-production, “Bird 1” and the irrepressible “Always Loved a Film.”
CD3 is a deeper but maybe non-essential exploration of some of the band’s rarities. The highlight is the heavy, monolithic “Second Hand” which featured on the Café del Mar Volume 1 compilation. Other notable tracks include the dazzling acid workout “Why, Why, Why,” the rising jam “Parc (Live)” and spacious, meditative “Simple Peal” which were all previously only available on Japanese imports.
The five-disc, six-and-a-quarter-hour long edition of Underworld’s 1994 debut (well, debut in the form that most people would recognize as Underworld, with Rick Smith and Karl Hyde teaming up with Darren Emerson in the wake of Underworld mk I’s collapse) is the kind of thing you’d never recommend to someone interested in checking out the band for the first time. Lengthier than some bands’ entire discographies, replete with alternate versions and collector detritus (really amazing collector detritus, but still), it is an embarrassment of riches for fans but a very heavy meal for the neophyte. The album itself, justly a classic, sounds great here, but the much more digestible two-disc Deluxe Edition is an easier place to start (and boasts the same remaster, which to the band’s credit sounds fresher and sharper but not painfully louder nor brickwalled into oblivion). That version’s second disc compiles some of the early and important singles and the previously unreleased songs from the bigger version, a smart approach if not actually one that culls the very cream from the (much) longer edition, although it does have the advantage of not taking a quarter of your day to listen to. Or is that an advantage?
If nothing else, getting and devoting oneself to this kind of actually-deluxe edition allows the kind of deep dive that many of us seem to find hard to manage or justify in 2014. Editions like this one often work best when you come to them already intimately familiar with the original work, allowing material like the live rehearsal recorded in the band’s home studio (that would be disc 5) to function both as a pleasure in its own right (that 18-minute “Spoonman”!) and a new way of approaching and understanding work you’ve loved for years. The bonus material here has been IntellIgently organized and, with one or two minor exceptions, very intelligently chosen (and given taste, we probably all disagree which of the 41 tracks here are those exceptions). If this isn’t everything of worth Underworld had in the vaults from this era, it certainly feels like it sometimes, a mark of how satisfying (and yes, exhaustive) it is.
Dubnobasswithmyheadman has at this point been canonized and picked-over enough that there’s little enough to add, but in the context of all this other material it’s kind of amazing all over again that Hyde, Smith, and Emerson came up with such a fully-formed sound and emotional tone from all these disparate directions they might have taken. While the supplementary material is great, there’s only maybe one example of a track so good you might wish it had made the cut instead (that would be the immortal “Rez”, especially ever since their live album indelibly connected it and “Cowgirl”). Interestingly enough, most of the less dancefloor-friendly songs here are found on the original LP, like the lithely downtempo “River of Bass” and the plaintive, sparse “Tongue”. On the album they serve to give the likes of the dark, cathartic “Dirty Epic” and the propulsive, buzzing “Spoonman” greater impact through contrast, but as the other four discs here prove, Underworld could have easily made an album that would have been much more conventionally club focused (and it would have also been astounding, but perhaps a little less distinctive).
Those four discs cover, in order, non-album singles and b-sides (including two songs they released under the Lemon Interrupt name), remixes, previously unreleased material (mostly rough versions, with some worthwhile new songs) and the aforementioned rehearsal tapes. While any fan who owns a significant number of Underworld releases will find some duplication, the band appear to have generally tried to avoid that common pitfall (“Bigmouth” and “Big Meat Show”, both of which appeared on the recent 1992-2012 The Anthology, only appear here on the rehearsal tape for example) while still being definitive. There are definitely some oddities, especially for fans that weren’t around when some of this material was originally released (“Dirtyguitar”, for example, contains elements of both “Dirty Epic” and “Mmm…Skyscraper I Love You”, not two songs you’d necessarily think to combine), and some revelations even for longtime fans: the sublime outro to “Mmm…Skyscraper I Love You” appears to have been composed by adding the guitar riff from the fine, previously unreleased “Can You Feel Me?” to what’s tagged as the “After Sky” version of the former here, and more than once you can hear Karl Hyde trying out different lyrical and vocal techniques on the way to the assured, stream of consciousness sloganeering he fully pioneered on the original album, an approach that’s still one of the most striking things about Underworld’s work.
Whether due to the material available or preference, “Mmm…Skyscraper I Love You” and “Dark & Long” get most of the spotlight here, with both songs showing up in six and seven different versions, respectively, across the five discs (although four songs from the original release only turn up on the first disc here). Normally just over two hours worth of those two songs might run the risk of tediousness, but the range from (for example) the pulsing, subdued album version of “Dark & Long”, the featured-in-Trainspotting synth washes of “Dark & Long (Dark Train)”, and the 20-minute, beatific “Dark & Long (Thing in a Book Mix)” are transformed enough that including them all doesn’t feel redundant or lazy. Of course, this is a band who once released a 65-minute US single half composed of versions of the same song that plays better than a lot of contemporary electronic albums.
The songs and versions included here are of such uniformly high quality that it’s a bit of a shame that they aren’t spread out a little more evenly, admittedly; the two alternate versions of “Cowgirl” that are here, for example, are among the best bonus material here. The “Irish Pub in Kyoto” mix is an instrumental take that occasionally sounds like a factory in a videogame (in the best possible way), while the previously unreleased demo (tagged, as everything on disc 4 is, with information that presumably means more to them than us, in this case “(Alt Cowgirl C69 Mix From A1564)”) sees a subdued Hyde working through a set of lyrics about a cowgirl “under a branded sky” that did not make the album version at all. It’s further in that Hyde appears to almost stumble on a few lines that would wind up either repeated or just looped in the released version (“call me I feel like flying into” appears here only as part of a longer monologue, for example) over tumbling drums that have a looser feel than the seething LP version. The result is something that is almost totally unlike “Cowgirl” despite being unmistakably the same song; in the old days they could have thrown it on the b-side as a “part two” and it would have been a cult favourite.
At the risk of turning in a review as long as the BOX set, there isn’t room to dig through all of this wonderful material to describe how many similar cases there are in this edition of Dubnobasswithmyheadman. But over and over again these discs subtly unlock new angles on the original, the way the instrumental “Dirty Ambi Piano” version of “Dirty Epic” makes those foghorn synths in the back almost holy. Six hours and fifteen minutes is a lot of time to spend contemplating an album once, but this set argues in the strongest possible terms that Underworld Mk II’s first effort is well worth it;
few albums have been so keenly expected as the new musical opus from Underworld, the oddly named Beaucoup Fish. Most famous for their track “Born Slippy”, which was featured prominently in the film of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting a couple of years ago, Underworld nearly didn’t survive long enough to produce their next album. With the unexpected success of “Born Slippy”, Underworld were suddenly the band of the moment and threatened to be eclipsed by a song they considered so throwaway that it doesn’t appear on any of their three albums. Thankfully, after the usual rock star cycle of fear and self-loathing, Underworld have re-emerged with a collection of songs that reinforces their reputation as the most original dance act the UK has ever produced. If the Prodigy are the Sex Pistols with a beat box and the Chemical Brothers are a cackling younger sibling let loose on your record collection with a chainsaw, Underworld are altogether somewhere else. Don’t get me wrong – Underworld will sonically rip your head off if you want them to, with slices of raw electricity like “Kittens” and “Moaner” (first heard on the Batman and Robin soundtrack album). But where their enduring appeal lies is that you don’t know what to expect next from an Underworld album. One minute you’re in enveloped in the dancefloor inferno of “King Of Snake”, the next you’re thoughtfully drifting along to the melancholy melodies of “Wynger”, all the while accompanied by the surreal, cut-up lyrics of Karl Hyde. Underworld: Beaucoup Fish It’s this mixture of precise mechanoid structure and freeform human voices that make Underworld one of the warmest sounding bands around – ironic for three guys who treat and manipulate virtually every sample that passes through their hands. “Cups”, Beaucoup Fish’s opening track, is a case in point – listening to it feels like sun rays on your face. Moreover, like any great band’s output, Beaucoup Fish repays repeated listening – except for the aforementioned dancefloor fillers, it can easily pass you by the first time. But what appears to be a random collection of tracks soon metamorphoses into an intricate and beautiful landscape of sound. Live, Underworld are interested in making you move. While DJ Darren Emerson and knob-twiddler extraordinaire Rick Smith are gently bobbing up and down behind their wall of equipment, Karl Hyde is out front exhorting the crowd on to ever greater heights, not with his voice, but with his own brand of don’t-give-a-fuck dancing and a smile the width of the ocean. Visuals courtesy of the avant-garde design collective Tomato wash the entire stage, while live pictures of the crowd and band are superimposed over the top as the music moves further and further up the scale, intoxicating and irresistible. Underworld may be a band who ooze intelligence in everything they do from their record sleeves to their musical preferences, but that doesn’t stop them wanting you to lose yourself in their sounds. So, if you’re still wondering what Underworld sound like, the answer is: they sound like Underworld. For all their categorisation as a dance outfit, there are no bands to whom Underworld sound similar or to whom they owe an obvious musical debt. Underworld have created not only their own sound but their own genre. You won’t see or hear their like again.
