Beaucoup Fish

by

Underworld

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Beaucoup Fish came out during the summer and it keeps popping up on my player when I'm looking for a pure cutting edge listening experience.

Underworld is Darren Emerson, Karl Hyde, and Rick Smith, who've been rave faves for years. I first heard Underworld on the Trainspotting soundtrack a couple years ago, which featured a nine minute drum and bass cut called Born Slippy. That was good but I liked Dark and Long on Trainspotting II more. Beaucoup Fish is more like Dark and Long.

Fish is danceable in some places but it's much more an album to have around for just listening. Starting off with the monumental work Cups, easily my favorite among several strong cuts, Underworld sounds like what 10cc might have been doing if they had survived into the late 90's. It's cool electronic music, with vocals processed on a vocoder to be down and subliminal, almost subversive. No sample rip-offs, real vocals, with a touch of Euro-rap. Approaching ambient, Underworld's style is more like blue electronic jazz.

Push Upstairs is more upbeat than Cups, but the tempo goes down again for Jumbo. Another favorite, Skym, sounds as if Greg Lake is doing the vocals, then there's Push Downstairs, a spacier counterpoint to the earlier track. Kittens has lovely bridge in the middle that is a great test for your stereo. On some systems I've played it on, especially at low volume, the synth parts in the background sound as if a wad of lint has gotten stuck on the stylus. But of course we're listening to a CD here. It's actually a deceivingly multi-layered section that really blossoms on a good system at high volume. Maybe I can leverage that psuedo-distortion to get my wife's permission to upgrade my car's stereo, what do you think?

Trip-hop, techno-ambient, electro-jazz, it doesn't matter what you label it. Beaucoup Fish is one of the best albums I've heard this year.