It was twenty years ago that Underworld released one of the definitive albums of the 90s, dubnobasswithmyheadman. Much of it- Mmm...Skyscraper I Love You, Dark And Long, Dirty Epic, Cowgirl, River Of Bass, M.E.- sounded like tomorrow and to be honest still does. The first time I heard this song it took my head off. Karl Hyde's non-sequitur, snatched lyrics were a revelation for this kind of music too...
'Thirty thousand feet above the earth...it's a beautiful thing and you're a beautiful thing... and I see Elvis... and I hear God on the phone...Elvis, fresh meat and a little whipped cream...and I hear God on the phone...porn dog sniffing the wind... will you be my big new plaything, my total de-disorientator, my ninja power, my number cruncher...thirty thousand feet above the earth...it's a beautiful thing'
6 comments:
I've been walking round this week, either listening to odd pastoral things or singing the Chems Hey Boy Hey Girl in the style of the Ramones (try it!)or saying 'I see Elvis'. God I love that album.
On t' news today, it said that 1 in 5 people admit to stealing from the Bagging Area.
3 are lying and the other 1 must be me. (Although I did place the very finest truffles from mid-Languedoc on the scales once ... and then selected 'Sprouts'. £8.99's worth of French pig-snuffled funghi for 46p)
That's what the Bagging Area is for- bargain pig snuffled funghi. Good work DVD. Although I couldn't really condone defrauding a major supermarket chain.
1993 saw me totally enamoured of Youth and Paul McCartney's The Fireman project. Strawberries Oceans Ships Forest - Youth deconstructing and then reinterpreting McCartney's work and then writing new music to augment that with McCartney seemed genre defying upon first listen.
Then came along 1994 & Dubnobasswithmyheadman witch seemed to be cut (and re-pasted) from some of the same cloth. But it seemed to up the ambient ante.
MMM Skyscraper... and Cowgirl are simply untouchable - so much so that Underworld have never quite met the challenge of one upping them selves for me. Cowgirl, especially, takes the art of repetition and gives it a rubberized quality that just becomes like a thumping, bouncing heartbeat.
Dubnobasswithmyheadman is often the album of choice when I'm cycling the coastal paths of the West of Scotland. The sound of the chain winding its way through the sprocket often bleeds in to the mix and adds a certain something to it. You're right about it sounding like tomorrow. 20 years ago, eh?!?
Cowgirl sounds like a nightclub- trippy, squiggly, disembodied voices, repetition. I can smell the dry ice when I listen to it.
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