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1992-2002
(JBO)
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If there is such a thing as a dance-music band, DJ Darren Emerson and keyboardist Rick Smith, who together (after earlier personnel changes) perform as Underworld, have mastered the form. The 20-plus songs collected on these two CDs, a selection of their first 10 years, have it all: melody, rhythm, loud and soft tones, dark vocals and bright, dreamy orchestrations and stark solo rhythms. Electronic, synthesized, slightly "glam" in the 1980s British sense of the term, picking up where the mid-’80s Vince Clark/Alison Moyet duo Yaz left off, Underworld create the music that Clarke and Moyet might well have made had he not left to help form Depeche Mode (leaving Moyet musically homeless, even now): fast but not hurried, sexual but not obsessively so, a music of inner ecstasy and outward polish astride a wavy, warm carpet of electronic rhythm (and always heavily indebted, like almost all dance-beat electronica, to Giorgio Moroder's music for Donna Summer). As with all the most effective dance music, the rhythms of Underworld songs incorporate melody: you can sing them as you move along them. Some are segued together here and some are not; it makes no difference because the work of Smith and Emerson never varies from its tender, vocalizing beat even as the emphasis keeps shifting, within that beat, from drums to synthesizer riffs to dreamy highs. The songs from the early 1990s, — "Bigmouth," "Dirty," "Dark and Long (Dark Train)" — sound no different from more recent efforts like "Cowgirl," "Born Slippy," the magnificently droll "Push Upstairs," and "King of Snake." Constancy is Underworld’s œuvre.
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