Underworld: Beaucoup Fish : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Underworld contentedly played to a cult audience for years, until 1996, when they found themselves on the hit Trainspotting soundtrack exactly at the point when the genre they'd been working in for most of their lives was suddenly proclaimed the next big thing. Before the Brit techno trio could get its next album out, the American media had deemed that genre -- electronica -- a non-happening, yet they still looked to Underworld to prove them wrong.

With Beaucoup Fish, Karl Hyde, Rick Smith and Darren Emerson do what they probably would have done had none of the ups and downs ever happened -- create darkly physical grooves that seduce psyche, body and soul without resorting to instant hooks or easily understood concepts. There is no ready-made "Born Slippy," the single that graced a thousand quickie electronica compilations in the wake of Trainspotting. Nor do Underworld undertake a radical stylistic switcheroo to compete with this moment's big-beat boys. Their specialty is an undulating trance throb that shimmers with shades of rock, contemporary symphonics, dub, disco, house, spoken word, whatever. The result still sounds like Underworld, and the fiftieth play sounds better than the fifth.

The epic opener, "Cups," evokes Herbie Hancock's Seventies vocoder jazz, with sweetly distorted vocals sprinkled across shifting slabs of slinky rhythm, ever-changing repetition and much-understated drama. Archetypal for Underworld but unlike typical club fare, the track doesn't end the same way it starts -- there's a musical narrative here, even if it's incomprehensible to all but your feet. The first single, "Push Upstairs," layers an angular piano riff, a stuttering bass boom, Hyde's drawling rant and cinematic suspense. Later, "Push Downstairs" floats similar poetry over a languid ambient pool. If there's a future dance classic here, it's "King of Snake," which subverts the famous spiraling synth flow of Donna Summer's epochal "I Feel Love" with clattering snares and splattering echo frenzy. Will it pull Underworld over-ground? The answer could be in the next big soundtrack. (RS 811)

BARRY WALTERS