sherburne on underworld

[kid cue]

http://www.emusic.com/features/spotl...81_200610.html

an interesting take, sure to inspire ire

[Liam]

Hmmm... I find that I am inclined to dissagree with almost every single point that he makes.

[dubman]

well, i find that i agree with him about their relevance. he pretty much hit the nail and called it out in terms of what underworld means to the larger audience. it's even rather true about dubnobass. it *was* an accident. a mash of tracks they did in a post-mk1 haze that they realized would make a good album (something sid in an interview at some point), but things get cold when he starts trying to analyze the feel of STITI and conclude that it was grasping at straws or going unbalanced. he praises the linearity of twist in one breath, and mentions the album rowla is on as 'going through the motions.' the frantic aspect of pearl's girl is construed as a bad thing (???), and the criticism gets more abstract and stops saying anything valuable altogether in talking about beaucoup fish.
he uses the jarring aspects of their tunes and, from what i can tell, the variation and different attitudes contained within each one, as a sign of failure, and that the desire to load a song with sounds is supposed to be a creative dead end. this isnt a fucking theivery corporation album. the CD isnt going to be water off a duck's back, it's going to be different. not blow your mind different, and not especially harder to digest, but as one good line put it, "the fiftieth listen is better than the fifth." this doesnt especially warm them to everyone, but the people who would have problems with it can name a lot of things about the music that bother them a lot more than just FLOW.

he also implies that this is division of styles is signifying a lack of creative inspiration, and that they dont know what they're doing. now, let's bring tomato into this. i dont know about you guys, but a large part of why i include 'beaucoup fish' as possible favorite of mine is because the visual aspects of the album --brought out in their videos, live tour, artwork-- reached the high point. it was brilliant and inseperable. dubnobass was certainly incredible on this front in terms of album artwork, but i dont feel the same inseperable aspects, as that artwork could stand alone in the 'skyscraper' book, and frankly the videos were rather weak and the style undeveloped. BF introduced to me how such abstract visuals could fuse to music on a fundamental level. it's not "music videos", where fast music gets fast imagery... it's opening different possibilites for the visual medium in electronic music other than hyper-technologial fetishism (something electronic music in general is always in danger of), and being specific to the same aesthetic that ran the album.

all this noise and praise might not detract from the fact that it was also UW's major break from the public, and i'm not contesting that, but that seems to be also his main argument behind the creative fall of underworld, and that an album as relatively lousy as AHDO (a lot of individual tracks are great, but it never really came together as a whole for me) is actually a blueprint for future brilliance. theres a reason why the riverruns have been so refreshing, and it's because they realized they needed to pull out of the complacency apparent on ahdo and especially on tracks like DA3D. while i do agree that they sound like they're trying to find themselves again, i dont think it really lies in AHDO, and the hasty rationalizations for their increasing obscurity seem casually lazy and dont serve as a good bridge to his future points. perhaps a large reason that half as many people bought AHDO was because with the much more pervalent P2P, people could just casually download and listen to see if it was really worth forking the cash for, and unless you were a FAN, there was little to immediately say this one should have been bought over a host of other ones that year, if indeed these people bought albums anymore.

and on a basic level, this guy just sounds old. he basically called out 'kittens' for fulfilling a depraved drug high and overshooting the mark, then favored 'twist' for its light touches of whathaveyous and "flavor." personally i prefer a relentless beat with a lot of noise and without the drugs than the lazy-sunday "chill down compilation"-ness of twist. if your basic problem involves you covering your ears and complaining about the bass, then you're just asking your bands to be friendlier to you, not to find a creative spark.

[King of Snake]

Who the f*ck is Philip Sherburne anyway and why should we care about anything he says?

really, I really don't see the point of some columnist overanalysing some band or some music and trying to prove some "point" that can't be proven and using lots of big fancy words to do it.

a main-stage act grown accustomed to playing enormous, amphetamine-fueled festival crowds, where altitude becomes not a luxury but an imperative. Reduced to facilitating the indefinite buildup of adrenaline and the unbridled release of serotonin, the group ends up flailing in its very pursuit of transcendence.

uhhh....yeah man. Like...totally...whatever.
It's not even clear what the piece is supposed to be... is it a review of AHDO, or some sort of career overview?

His comments about STITI alone are proof enough that the guy doesn't have a clue. Or rather, proof enough that an opinion is just that, an opinion.

[BeautifulBurnout]

He has to make a living somehow, the poor man!

And it is so much more fashionable these days for critics to be, well, critical, especially on the other side of the pond.

He has some good points in there, but he strikes me more as someone who has barely listened to the music at all, almost certainly never set foot in an Underworld gig in his life, and is putting his own spin on already-published articles that have been written over the years, with a huge leap in assumption to replace actual knowledge and/or proper research.

But hey. We are the "hardcore fans" after all. So we are not going to appreciate the negativity.

[Eikman]

i wonder if he gets paid to mention villalobos in every freaking article he writes these days....

besides that, the article doesn't appear to me as necessarily negative...

[Leon]

I just can't agree with his points, he's just wrong


And he should listen to STITI more

[kid cue]

the response was shocking

KOS i especially love your manifold defense mechanism-statements

Sherburne is probably the best person writing anything on techno today. he also spins techno. he opened for Michael Mayer in NYC not very long ago. not that i agree with him either, Beaucoup Fish is still my favorite.

anyway, last night i dreamt that UW released a new, 2CD version of AHDO and it was a million million times better.

[BeautifulBurnout]

Originally Posted by kid cue

the response was shocking

KOS i especially love your manifold defense mechanism-statements

Sherburne is probably the best person writing anything on techno today. he also spins techno. he opened for Michael Mayer in NYC not very long ago. not that i agree with him either, Beaucoup Fish is still my favorite.

anyway, last night i dreamt that UW released a new, 2CD version of AHDO and it was a million million times better.

Come, now. Are you sure you were shocked, having posted a vaguely negative article about UW on .... wait for it ... an Underworld Forum? I think, rather, you posted, then sat back and ate popcorn as you flushed out the fanboy/fangirls with their "manifold defence mechanisms" as usual duckie?

Ah well. Hope you have fun. Blood sports are traditional on Boxing Day after all.

[GreenPea]

That is really insightful BLD.