UNDERWORLD

UNDERWORLD
OBLIVION WITH BELLS (2007)
320 KBPS

After a five-year hiatus, Underworld return with an album that draws from across their past. With a mix of aggression and sunshine, they calculate syncopated, ricocheted beats against cleanly delineated textures and circumscribed melodies that have the cool of the 1980s New Romantic movement from which they originally sprang as Freur. Kraftwerk is in the DNA of their sound, but they've moved well past that, incorporating elements of hip-hop and industrial music into the mix. I wonder if Underworld's later mix of poetic spoken-word songs affected Brian Eno's recent work with poetry and music, because the influence seems to have boomeranged back in the vocal cadences of tracks such as "Ring Road." Like some of Eno's work, Karl Hyde's frequently treated, monotone talk-singing vocals could have been time-shifted from a beat-poetry reading of the early '60s. The only thing missing is the bongos. When his voice is processed, it merges as part of the sound field, but when his voice is relatively unaltered, as on "Good Morning Cockerel," it just becomes tedious. The best tracks on Oblivion with Bells are also the most ambitious. "Crocodile" has some lovely, almost Gregorian harmonies, while "Beautiful Burnout" is an epic journey with broad synthesizer chords sweeping by like headlights before segueing into a joyfully ritualistic electro-percussion tribal workout. But after that pair of opening tracks, you have to wait until the very last piece, a long, trancey bit of psychedelic drift called "The Best Mamgu Ever," to hear something more than unformed melodies and unstrung ideas. Underworld can reach higher ground.

1. Crocodile
2. Beautiful Burnout
3. Holding The Moth
4. To Heal
5. Ring Road
6. Glam Bucket
7. Boy, Boy, Boy
8. Cuddle Bunny vs The Celtic Villages
9. Faxed Invitation
10. Good Morning Cockerel
11. Best Mamgu Ever