[dubman]

i suppose i was being vague.
i remember reading an interview with bono where they were effectively dismissing a wide swath of their early-ish discography because much of the songs sounded underproduced and unfinished. this was a little bit after "all that you can't leave behind", an album that buried what was already a group dubiously teetering between fashion and experimentation, then just fell completely into outright pap. and it made me think that their worst album came at a time when they were in the ideal position to have all the tools they ever wanted to get the sounds "just so". it was super clean, very deliberate. they wanted to make the type of song that could be structurally perfected more than one that was interesting or maybe just instinctively "right".

so now take OWB. johnny metropolis has a valid point, i think, in comparing globe, which feels very loose and appropriately live, and HTM, which for some reason incorporates some jazzy riffs, piano, and gives it a very different lounge atmosphere. it's good in some ways: a different way of doing the stram-of-lyrics approach, but i have to ask whether it's really necessary. it doesnt make it any more interesting, and simply adding more for the sake of musicality or filling it out is why i made the U2 comment. it doesnt *sound* as if each part were necessary to the whole, but more like musicians being "proper" musicians.
this basically means (again, to me... this is just what i notice and dont mean to say that this exactly is what happening as UW make music) that most images and ideas they go after get watered down not by process, but by the obligations of a *certain* process the music goes through. tracks that are, i guess, supposed to sound big-hearted and booming, like ring road, fall just short of that extra uncouth enthusiasm needed and end up sounding the bad kind of goofy.

this isnt a persistant problem on OWB for me. it's still underworld, and they're still doing great things. faxed invitation is wonderful for what little it has and glam bucket is a gem and a fine example of this perfection taken in the right direction. but there's something ominous creeping in the background. a certain standard for the kind of finish and production that would make tracks like a majority of the riverrun "not fit" for wide release even as most of it is more interesting than a lot of OWB. as nice as "to heal" is, wtf is the point? and why take out the spoken bit sample? the part that brought it a bit further away from routine cinematic baiting? i get the nagging feeling that even the first two tracks could have done a lot more with a lot less; BB especially sounds constrained, despite the unusual lyrical arrangement, in explicitly being driving and "intense" so that it doesnt feel adaptable to different ideas and interpretations.

this is something i've noticed in them since AHDO's release. the kind of visual versatility and sleight of hand shown in videos like push upstairs and jumbo gave way to straight interpretations (and lyrics) in TMO and an especially ill-advised DA3D video (taking the straight nature of the track as "dance" and applying some of the most rote and god-awful imagery for it). so while OWB might not nearly be as boxed in as AHDO in terms of ideas, it's certainly getting further into post-producing it like a group that belives in something being objectively great, and wants that more than making something *actually* different.