30,000 Feet Above the Competition
In electronica’s rise through the 1990s, we discovered prolific recluse Aphex Twin, French revolutionaries Daft Punk and really good drugs from The Chemical Brothers. Nine Inch Nails and The Prodigy brought anger to the table, while Moby’s and Fatboy Slim’s music and mixes were as ubiquitous as furniture. The London group Underworld reached their brief yet highest peak with the 1996 use of non-album cut “Born Slippy .NUXX” in Trainspotting. While that track left an indelible mark on both dance and movie music, those in the know probably felt that Underworld and their 1994 LP Dubnobasswithmyheadman had been lost in the shuffle. So what better time to nail down the album’s true place in techno canon than on its 20th anniversary?
Much in the same way that The Police entered punk with the unfair advantage of many years in musical practice and other bands, core Underworld members Rick Smith and Karl Hyde were hardly newcomers to electro-rock. They had seen minor success in the New Wave group Freur, and already had two Underworld albums with old lineups by the time they enlisted DJ Darren Emerson to flesh out what would come next. Dubnobasswithmyheadman transformed stagnating synthpop into something far more complex: Music that was poetic and abstract yet purposeful, repeatable, its rhythms endlessly engaging—the sonic equivalent of plotting fractal math.
Unlike most dance albums of the day, Dubnobass told stories—only God and Karl Hyde know what they were ultimately about, but still. “M.E.” seemed to be a nicely dressed-up treehugging anthem, a rare moment where blunt and earnest Hyde lyrics worked. “Mmm Skyscraper I Love You” always felt like a POV from a Robert Altman film, if Robert Altman did sci-fi. “Dark & Long,” meanwhile, managed to hover between cut-up love song and stalker diary. And then there was the fluid musicianship, rock-conscious in a manner few contemporaries could match. You would hear processed-guitar sexiness in “Tongue,” leading into the relentlessly anthemic “Cowgirl,” and then to “River of Bass,” not so much a dance-floor workout as a softly insistent tribute to the low end. (Meghan Trainor, take note.)
This wasn’t merely dance music made with guitars. Rather, it was progressive music—not Rush or Genesis, but similarly imaginative—from people who knew how to get it to traverse digital music’s broadening spectrum and embrace its rhythms and technologies. The phrase “intelligent techno” got tossed about a bit in those heady times leading up to big beat and the superstar DJ; Aphex Twin may have been the great electronic alchemist of the moment, but at least you heard Underworld talk the talk as well as walk the walk. As your author can attest, this was one of those great gateway-drug albums people come across hopefully a few times in a lifetime.
The “Super Deluxe” reissue includes the original album remastered to pull out previously-hidden sonic details and, more importantly, four additional discs exploring every corner of its context. Discs two and three compile a lot of the early public history of this incarnation of the group. There are some neat A-sides the trio performed under the name Lemon Interrupt; “Dirty” contains the DNA of Dubnobass cut “Dirty Epic,” while “Eclipse” is more in line with One Dove’s brand of ambient-dub pop. “Dark & Long” appears in a variety of remixed and reconfigured forms (including the muted yet monstrous 20-minute “Thing in a Book” version), as do “Mmm Skyscraper I Love You” and “Cowgirl.”
The remaining discs let us peek at Underworld’s creative process. Disc four collects aborted versions of album cuts, singles, and remixes pulled from band hard drives, rough only insofar as they were never mastered or otherwise perfected. (Lost track “Birdstar” really should have seen the light of day.) The first attempt at “Dark & Long” includes a lot of what would show up in the final version; a mix of “Dirty Epic” stretches out its central piano figures in Orbital-like fashion; the slow ending of “Mmm Skyscraper,” it turns out, was once a five-minute track of its own. This portion of the reissue reinforces how, at this rebranding of their existence, Underworld employed fascinating Easter-egg arrangements allowing them to not just remix tracks but lift a representative sample or riff from one song and drop it into an unrelated one.
That skill of matching beats and sounds often manifested itself in Underworld’s live shows, and historically pleased the most crowds through their mix of vinyl cut “Rez” and its sister track “Cowgirl.” To that end, disc five holds a studio rehearsal from just prior to the album’s release. Anchored equally by synth-loop improv and elements of “Mmm Skyscraper I Love You,” it supplies everything from sped-up arena-ready thump to New Wave songsmithing. It underscores Underworld’s role of band-as-DJ, and adds to probably an album’s worth of sonic ideas heard on the box set that could have easily followed Dubnobass yet never made it out of committee. Bucking the trend of reissues with multiple versions that get increasingly bloated and pointless as the price points go up, this highest-end Dubnobasswithmyheadman collection suggests that more really is more.
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