A thing more lovely than broken

REVIEW: Underworld
lovely broken thing (www.underworldlive.com)
Star rating: ****

The title of this new release reflects the world as seen by Underworld: just because a thing is broken doesn’t mean it can’t be lovely. Over the years, Underworld’s career has been one of focusing on the strange, dark and broken; turning the camera lens on the least photogenic object in the frame; recording fragments of conversations and collecting ambient noises hardly anyone else would consider recording; looping and repeating and making something arresting and lovely out of the commonplace, the banal and the weird.

In fact, that might be the only way left to do new things; in a time of “post-modern” irony it’s just too obvious to do the obvious.

You will need to do the obvious to get at this music: register with a valid email address and a password. But it only takes a minute, and I was downloading the music in fewer than five. ‘lovely broken thing’ promises to be the first in a series of ‘bundled’ releases from Underworld, each containing audio, photographs and artwork. This download is delivered to you as a zipped MP3 file containing the audio section: seven new tracks woven into a single piece.

The gallery is a selection of Karl Hyde’s striking black and white photographs and the album artwork is by tomato’s John Warwicker, a long-time Underworld collaborator and “curator” of the photos. The titles of the largely urban, black and white shots belie the images, framing them in a humorous new light. I don’t have a photo iPod so I haven’t tried viewing the images while listening to the music but, scrolling through the thumbnails while listening on my laptop, I imagine that would add yet another dimension to the experience.

Since downloading ‘lovely broken thing’, I’ve been thinking about how best to describe the music (if at all). A distillation of those thoughts is that Underworld has never settled on the easy option, never shied away from taking risks. None of the seven pieces that form ‘thing’ wastes a second of your time masquerading as anything you’ve heard them do before. Their records give you a sense that they’re constantly searching, listening and expressing sounds in a new way. Sounds are treated, degraded, made cruder; and, as a result of all the attention, become lovelier.

The opening and second-longest track (at around 05’36”), jal to tokyo, uses an overlay of vocoder-type effects, a relentless beat and a collage of juxtaposed word-images to chronicle (ostensibly) a long-haul flight to Japan, from which you absorb a different array of words and images each time you listen to it.

The second track, billy goat — fast, beaty and longest, at around 06’02” — is anchored by an ominous bass of which David Lynch would be proud, and develops a rising and falling percussion pattern that itself becomes a melodic voice. To my ears, the overarching harmonies hint at Weather Report-era Josef Zawinul: looming and receding atmospheres that weave in and out of the drop-outs and lo-fi analogue synth effects (that’s just an impression; I have no idea what was used to create goat but that hasn’t compromised my enjoyment). It sounds like a blending of old and new — contrast it with the digital, hi-tech ‘machine art’ of someone like BT (Brian Transeau), whose ‘Movement in Still Life’ was arguably Underworld-influenced. This sounds more organic.

The staticky percussion, niggling bass thump, glam-rock fuzz chord and Karl’s Lennonesque vocal unite to make peggy sussed the most entertaining track on ‘lovely broken thing’. Again, fragmentary lyrical images break through with successive listenings (“I’m a broke-leg pony that’s winning the race” is one line that quickly registers, for obvious reasons), and the pulsing, fuzzy bass notes keep up the electronic end of things. Meanwhile, some swirling, ethereal harmonics gather momentum in the background, threatening to evict the beat.

dub shepherd plays around with a kind of gated wah effect on Karl’s repeated “Walk with me” vocal. Underworld never walks the straight path, so this is an unusual stroll through strange pastures. Just as the beat becomes hypnotic, you’re caught in a rainstorm that drums against imagined objects and creates its own ambient soundscape while the eight-beat percussion pattern continues around it.

A roll of thunder, dripping rain and the beat segues into lenny penne: another simple, repeated text line fused with a more complex percussion pattern. The breakbeats towards the end are an example of what I think of as the ‘Underworld Rhythm Method’, as once defined to me by the author Nick Hornby. He expressed it much better than I can, but Hornby’s gist was that rhythm is often the hook in Underworld’s music: everything in the mix speaks at a defined pitch, with a defined pattern of decay and sustain, is its own voice.

This makes for a deceptively simple sound that bears repeated listening in the way Can, Kraftwerk or Captain Beefheart do; nothing is as it sounds on the surface. The best example of these shifting, subliminal depths for me was Dirty Epic from 1994’s ‘Dubnobasswithmyheadman’.

The rain and thunder return towards the end of lenny penne, neatly bringing it to a close in the same way as dub shepherd (although it took me several listens to notice). It’s part six, monkey wink, that perhaps comes closest to the Underworld sound with which we’re familiar from Rez and Cowgirl, but it also has the trance-like quality exemplified by Tangerine Dream albums such as ‘Rubycon’; both halves of which culminated in a repetitious pattern of massed sequencers and synthesisers with other sounds washing over them. Intensified by repetition and embellishments, monkey wink’s five-note pattern certainly seems to doff its organ grinder’s cap in that direction.

I’d hate to dismiss it as a “trick”, but it happens so reliably in Underworld’s music that it’s virtually a trademark: your mind loses its place and, with it, the first beat in the bar. Suddenly the accent shifts, creating a new pattern in your mind, although nothing has changed… or has it? It’s like a tiny door of perception opening.

witness fades in as monkey wink fades out, with an airy quality in which the spaces are as important as the notes. It’s the most ambient, shortest (01’38”) and most soothing section of the seven-part ‘thing’. Again, the lyrics have a fragmentary quality, like the cinders of a journal rescued from the fireplace. Familiar Hyde-words (“belly”, “rain”, “skin”) tell a story all their own; they don’t necessarily need verses or choruses. This witness leaves just as you’re getting acquainted, and you’re left with a clutch of memories.

A tip for iPod users: because the seven pieces segue into one another, when you transfer the extracted file of ‘lovely broken thing’ from WinZip to iTunes, open ‘Get info’ and paste “(1) jal to tokyo/(2) billy goat/(3) peggy sussed/(4) dub shepherd/(5) lenny penne/(6) monkey wink/(7) witness” into the ‘Name’ field alongside ‘lovely broken thing’. You’ll still need to keep a mental, numerical note of which section you’re listening to, but it’ll make it easier to remember which is your current favourite.

In a statement at the official Underworld site, Karl Hyde and Rick Smith comment on the thinking behind ‘lovely broken thing’:

“After years of recording, promoting, touring and falling out we think it’s time for us to step off the treadmill and give our time to a number of projects and ideas, some of which have been kicking around for years, firstly the score to anthony minghella’s new film, followed swiftly with some remixes/collaborations with some of our favourite underground dance producers/djs [...] and there will be more, much, much more.”

This new approach won’t spell the end of traditional albums, remixes and gigs, they say. But this is a praiseworthy step towards a more direct way of distributing music and ideas to existing fans, new listeners and anyone who’s lost touch with their recent releases — all of whom should applaud Underworld; not only for having the bravery to continue exploring well off the beaten track, but also for providing an insight into their own creative processes, beyond the boundaries of traditional releases and performances.

So ‘lovely broken thing’ is broken only in the sense of being attention-grabbing (there’s much more of it than there would be if it were intact), never because it isn’t worth having. And that makes it a lovely thing indeed.