Underworld - Oblivion With Bells

There was always something that pegged Underworld out from their cohorts in the heyday of nineties electronics. The majority of the dance press had already heralded them as crossover pioneers by the time their infamous Born Slippy b-side tore up the charts, and the band rode the ensuing crest of celebrity without significantly floundering, earning themselves a reputation for live extravaganzas and tight quality control. The departure of wunderkind Darren Emerson in 2000 steered founding members Rick Smith and Karl Hyde away from creating beat-laden super-club fodder, and now, five years after their last LP for Junior Boy's Own, the band have self-released their fifth studio album (or their seventh if you count their eighties genre-bending ventures). Oblivion With Bells is a rich and mixed bag of slick digital trinkets, very much a continuation of the experimental jamming they indulged in last year's download-only StreamScarper program. It may only be fifty-eight minutes long, but to pigeonhole this album into one set of brackets would be like trying to stuff Trafalgar Square into a Tupperware lunch-box. Hyde and Smith have returned to their roots of defying definition with this record.

As with previous LPs, the opening tracks are fused together to create a movement that gently lowers you into the Underworld palette. Beautiful Burnout picks up from the nightly soar of first single Crocodile, taking floundering Bontempi and grazing it with some electro tension till it becomes dark and sweet, like a wedge of cherry pie. Hyde's voyeuristic mutter is poured through a sleaze filter, adding broodiness to his accounts of 'Blood on a tissue on the floor of the train/Sun goes down/Temperature drops'. However, it's not just the photogenic lyrics that serve at the band's outlet for their cinematic indulgences, and the instrumental To Heal is their most screen-friendly composition to date, having been written as the elegant resolution cue for Danny Boyle's Sunshine. It's the perfect appendage to Holding The Moth, where Rick Smith's combo of mellow pads and a Donkey Kong bass signature sparkles with kinetic confusion.

It could be the fact that half the band recently entered their sixth decade, but Underworld have long lost interest in churning out compilation-ready techno assaults. Oblivion With Bells is perhaps the most experimental of the band's pressed releases, and the absence of any corporate muscle has allowed them to exhibit every creative whim they wish. That's not to say the music's quality has suffered as a result - if anything, it's more passionate than ever. Cuddle Bunny Vs The Celtic Villages fairly lives up to its title's imagination: an ambient interlude that tries to smother metallic gremlins with a synthetic hum. The PKE meter ramps up to over a thousand hertz before the whole affair's hosed clean by the holy water church organs and answerphone falsetto of the more docile Faxed Invitation, again making the most of its authors' versatile imaginations.

Smith and Hyde still know how to mix it when they feel the need, though, most notably on the thuggish Ring Road, where jungle beats are platted into a crisp helix as Hyde larily narrates an April stroll round his native Romford, kicking his heels like a pre-Botox Jackie Chan. Rock veteran Larry Mullen is brought in to bang the marimbas for Boy, Boy, Boy, a trim movement whose bassy plonk and montage-friendly rhythm seem to reference the Trainspotting chant-along that every lagerlout memorised, while the more mellow Glam Bucket connects ticking ethereal slabs which borrow from some of City Centre Offices' finest before meshing some epic guitar into the proceedings. Rather than opt for an explosive swansong, the mood eases a couple of atmospheres for the eventual conclusion, with Best Mamgu Ever blending looped piano flats with vocals that come deep and diced, like a monk praying into a fan, and Good Morning Cockerel letting a melancholy nocturne stagger into a shroud of cellos. This is by no means your conventional electronic album.

They may be making action movies for the chillout room rather than burning up the dancefloor, but Smith and Hyde show no signs of being carted off to the granny farm just yet. Underworld's formula is one that even Max Cohen couldn't crack, and it's a pleasure to see them still exploring tangents that many artists spend a whole album trying to plot. Like deep-sea coral or a compound inheritance, they're not showing any signs of worsening with age, and Oblivion With Bells marks a truly captivating chapter in their twenty-odd year existence.

You can hear the whole of Oblivion With Bells at the Underworld MySpace page:

Oblivion With Bells Track Listing:

01. Crocodile
02. Beautiful Burnout
03. Holding The Moth
04. To Heal
05. Ring Road
06. Glam Bucket
07. Boy, Boy, Boy
08. Cuddle Bunny Vs. The Celtic Villages
09. Faxed Invitation
10. Good Morning Cockerel
11. Best Mamgu Ever