June 27 - July 4, 1 9 9 6

Short-circuit

Underworld get swallowed by their own big-beat rep

by Carly Carioli

The word on Underworld is that they've created a marvelous Pink Floydian acid-rock album, Second Toughest in the Infants (Wax Trax!/TVT), out of electronic marbles. Fair enough. But more than that, they've created twilight music for the end of the day, and the end of the century. It's music with acute bipolar disorder, techno's hyperventilating, manic tempos undercut by an eerie, effusively brooding melancholy and a looped-to-infinity sadness. More so than Moby or Massive Attack or Goldie or Tricky, it's Underworld who've been pegged with carrying electronic dance music to a higher plane into the 21st century, codifying the music's strains of improvisation, poetry, and ambiance into something that deserves to stand toe to toe with/against rock and roll.

No problem there. But when Underworld came to Avalon last Wednesday (one of only four US dates on this tour), in what was touted as an "organic" show of techno-rock fusion, it served as a primer in the problems inherent in making electronic music work as rock performance.

See, we non-dancing rock crits would have gladly stayed away and let the technophiles have their little "rave" (not my term: ticket sales were so bad the Avalon bouncers were standing outside going "Hey -- wanna go to a rave?" to everyone who walked by) if not for the TVT folk, who touted the show as transcending the inert stage shows that have hampered electronic musicians from Orbital to the Young Gods. Underworld have already proved themselves a great techno band, or ambient band, or whatever; 1994's Dubnobasswithmyheadman (WaxTrax!/TVT) took care of that, and across the pond they even smashed a few guitars on stage. At Avalon, it seemed rather silly to push the rock-crossover angle. First because no one cared how the band operated, everyone seemed to love them and shimmied like crazy; and second because the only traditional instrument on stage was an electric guitar, which Karl Hyde picked up during the first song and put down 20 minutes later without playing a single note. Which sorta walks the line between silliness and outright fraud.

That's the problem: dance music, be it techno, jungle, house, whatever, is basically functional -- if you don't move bodies, you don't get paid. And Underworld's challenge -- whether on album, in live performance, or with Tomato (the ad/design agency they formed to market their outtakes as commercials for everyone from Coke to Six Flags Amusement Parks) -- is to make music that's both functional and artistic, irresistibly propulsive and dynamically expressive. There was no room on Avalon's dance floor for the somber nuance and penetrating subtlety that made Dubnobasswithmyheadman and Second Toughest in the Infants smash crossover/breakthrough favorites in England, and critical raves in the US.

Underworld gave the technoheads what they wanted -- an uberkinetic sensory overload where beat and strobe and smoke and mobile bodies conspired to induce a near out-of-body experience, when the stage seemed to tilt on an unseen axis and one's next step felt uncertain, confusion and liberation hanging in the balance, and Karl Hyde's relentless refrain pounding, swirling: "crazycrazycrazycrazycrazycrazycrazy . . . " Unless you were a reasonably antisocial rock critic scribbling in the corner, in which case you mighta been kinda bored.

Second Toughest's "Pearl's Girl" is more than just a clever beat -- though it's that, too, hammering at its most insistent somewhere between an African talking-drum phrase and a furious speed-hardcore drumroll, and supremely funky (as in James Brown's "Funky Drummer" funky) even at its most downcast. The song also has the suspended, subaquatic warmth of the womb, a narcotic stillness that's not quite interrupted by a nasty, corrugated buzzing like the world's biggest zipper being undone, or a chopper's whirring blades shredding a sea of alligators. Live, Underworld transformed these clashes into monotone nerve rushes . . . which made for a great party but lousy rock and roll.

But if the show was lacking, Second Toughest delivers the goods. The instrumental "Blueski," with looped samples of an acoustic guitar (a lick stolen from Robert Johnson, so they say), is a subterranean homesick blues, somewhere between a New Age ambient piece inspired by the Florida everglades and the coolest, longest intro Soundgarden have never thought of. There isn't a single drum beat on the entire track, which is maybe what makes it so haunting, hearing the (dance) floor literally drop away beneath you after 40-odd minutes of manic compression. And just to prove they weren't kidding, the following track (and the album's closer) switches to piano, assembling the kind of sparse, solemn piano figures Gastr del Sol use to disorient, then do 'em one better by grafting in the fadeaway-jump-shot-in-an-echo-chamber synth effect from the Steve Miller Band's "Fly like an Eagle." So what kind of music do you get when a techno outfit makes soundscapes you can't dance to? It could have been the most interesting question of the evening at Avalon, but Underworld didn't ask it.