[dubman]

it's nice to see them excited again and encouraging to hear Karl cop to post-2000 Underworld being a bit of a struggle (though there's a wiiiide collection of great tracks in the last 15 years). it'd be interesting to see what he thinks of the Riverruns now though, since everything he's talking about– how the edges were wearing off, how it wasn't in the same zone– felt like it was getting back to those specifically by not being "the Underworld that is an album", it sounded like an edited jam session, and it's still my favorite thing they've done since Darren left.

Rick is a bit odd isn't he? I have a hard time reconciling the frankenstein/olympics soundtrack with Bungalow with Stairs and yet they're both firmly solo projects of his. if OWB was really the UW album he's always wanted to make, the only thing linking all of these is a preoccupation with the kind of polish that i think Karl is sort of arguing against here. it's all gotten a lot less... dirty. It's sort of back here though, which is maybe why i find myself liking it a lot despite my superconscious yelling all sorts of unkind things about it as it plays.

I'm noticing the angle for these interviews, whether deliberate or a press angle, is that the last 15 years were some kind of forgotten weekend, that they're here now and ready to "be back". While I agree that we've mercifully shed OWB's acoustic pursuits (at least, toning it waaay down), this still fits pretty comfortably on their continuum; the raw days aren't coming back. They've rewound to AHDO energy and surpassed it as an album, but we need more than an EPs worth of material to feel what they're really doing here. we got ansum, we got headset, we got jams and rejects and it felt like no time before we got Riverruns and then a hop to OWB with more side bits. in earlier days when they weren't even "Being Underworld", they rattled off material to last for days. since that shift, each subsequent album created a distinct space and vision, before we even felt anything about it. By the time Nylon Strung wraps up, i feel like it was halfway to something larger, which is frustrating but also pretty optimistic too