#25 on the 2024 Bacon Top 31 — Underworld

January 07, 2025 by Royal Stuart in Top 31, 2024

Strawberry Hotel by Underworld

29 years ago, two seminal events happened that changed the course of my media intake forever. 1: Trainspotting, Danny Boyle’s life-affirming film of Scottish author Irvine Welsh’s heroin-fueled novel, hit the theaters on February 23, 1996, bringing with it a phenomenal soundtrack, including a lesser-known electronic band called Underworld and their top-10 all-time song, “Born Slippy .NUXX.” 2: Underworld released their sophomore album, Second Toughest in the Infants on March 11, 1996.

Trainspotting features a handful of mid-twenties friends trying to make it through life, at a time when I myself was coming into my mid-twenties. Both the novel and the film connected with me in a way that nothing else had to date. The soundtrack features a wide variety of artists, from classic rock of the 70s in Lou Reed and Iggy Pop, through 80s brit pop in New Order, Blur, and Pulp, to 90s electronic artists like Leftfield and Underworld. I developed a love of ALL of the artists featured on the soundtrack, but Underworld were above and beyond my favorite band of my 20s.

I remember the CD shop I frequented in college, and remember the day I picked up Second Toughest there. I can picture the location, the CD in my hand, excited to bring it to my apartment and listen to it. From its opening track “Juanita” through the closing “Stagger,” it is a phenomenal album through and through.

In addition to making great music, Karl Hyde and Rick Smith — the duo that make the bulk of Underworld’s music — were part of a graphic design collective called Tomato that, along with folks like David Carson, shaped the zeitgeist of design in the 90s. Being in school and studying visual communications at that time, absorbing everything aural and visual created by the band, seared them onto my still-forming mind.

I went back in time and fell in love with their great 1994 debut, Dubnobasswithmyheadman, and continued to love them through their third album, 1999’s Beaucoup Fish. As I grew older, they kept making albums, but I started to move on. I enjoyed their 2002 album, A Hundred Days Off, but 2007’s Oblivion with Bells didn’t fit my mid-30s world. I started documenting my Top 31 in 2009, but the band’s 2010 release, Barking, didn’t make it onto that year’s Top 31. Barbara Barbara, We Face a Shining Future, from 2016, made it onto the list at #30, but reading my words about the album then make it clear they were receiving a consolation prize, a shadow of their former selves. 2019’s Drift Series 1 did not rate.

But I still found myself going back to those 90s albums — more out of reminiscing than anything else. I bought the vinyl reissue of Dubnobasswithmyheadman in the mid 10’s, and I love it. But nothing new they were creating in the 2000s was matching their 90s greatness. This is my long, circuitous route to getting to the crux of the matter: this sentiment has changed with the duo’s 2024 release, Strawberry Hotel, their 11th album. This album is a resurgence of the Underworld of old. It hits all the same notes for me, despite the fact that I am now in my 50s.

Hit play on the video above, for the opening track “Black Poppies.” Gorgeous and lush, this song creates a soundscape of warmth that hums with excitement. You can also watch an alternate version, “Black Poppies (Unplugged), performed by a six-piece string group of college students that was put together by the band. Absolutely beautiful. And the band still has a grasp on driving, thumping beats: watch the visualizer for “Techno Shinkansen” and you’ll hear what I mean.

Maybe now that I’m working on my fifth decade of living I am in a nostalgic world, trying to reclaim my youth. It’s impossible for me to not hear Underworld from that biased stance. But I do love Strawberry Hotel, and I’m energized by the fact that they (and by extension, me, too) can keep making relevant, exciting things in 2025. I hope you’ll join me in this excitement.

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#20 on the 2022 Bacon Top 31 — Fontaines D.C.

January 12, 2023 by Royal Stuart in Top 31

Skinty Fia by Fontaines D.C.

The band just barely making the Top 20 of 2022 should be known to avid readers of the Bacon Review. Fontaines D.C., five Irishmen now living in London, have been on the Top 31 for their entire history — their debut, Dogrel, was #26 in 2019, and their stellar second album, A Hero’s Death, was #12 in 2020. Now they’re back, at (what we hope is) the tail end of the Covid pandemic, with a brutal album that is so perfect for right now.

Whereas in 2019 I was quick to compare the band to English post-punk outfit (and KEXP darlings) Idles (who were #16 in 2018 and #24 in 2020), Fontaines has pushed further and further from the sound that they burst onto the scene with back in 2019. The band still has the same core members (Carlos O'Connell and Conor Curley on guitar, Tom Coll on drums, Conor Deegan III on bass, and Grian Chatten, principle lyric writer and singer). But they’ve found a new version of themselves that will no doubt put a lot of previous listeners off. Chatten, who barely sings as it is, seems to magically take his voice an octave lower – more haunting, more droning. I love it.

The album name, Skinty Fia, is an arcane Irish slur that translates to “damnation of the deer.” In the interim between their 2020 2nd album and this one, the band left their native Ireland for London, in from what I read was more like an act of rebellion against the status quo. And yet the amount of Irish and Dublin-related elements of the album belie the fact that the band clearly miss home.

Listen to the song in the video above, “I Love You.” It starts off well enough, a paean to the home they left. But then it goes on, a near-shouted list of shame about Dublin that settles into a groove not unlike the best Underworld lyrics (substitute “lager, lager, lager” for “echo, echo, echo”). But London can be hard for the Irish, as demonstrated in the opening song, “In ár gCroíthe go deo” which is an Irish phrase that translates to “in our hearts forever”. Back in 2020, a recently departed Irish woman’s family had wanted to put that phrase on her gravestone but were forbidden to do so by the Church of England unless the family also put the English translation on there as well. That’s a level of cultural control bestowed by the state that is hard for me to even fathom, and well worthy of a song to commemorate it.

If you enjoyed “I Love You,” there are four other videos the band has produced from the album:

I know I can’t make you like everything I like. What a boring world that would be. But I hope you give this one a chance, even if it’s not resonating with you at first. After a few listens it sinks into your pores. With the torrential downpours the western side of the US has been getting these past few days, I can’t imagine something better to be listening to.

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21. I Love You Jennifer B by Jockstrap
22. Too Much to Ask by Cheekface
23. Dripfield by Goose
24. Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You by Big Thief
25. And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow by Weyes Blood
26. NOT TiGHT by DOMi & JD BECK
27. Preacher’s Daughter by Ethel Cain
28. Live at KEXP, vol. 10 by Various Artists
29. All You Need Is Time by Daisy the Great
30. Cool It Down by Yeah Yeah Yeahs
31. CAPRISONGS by FKA twigs

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#30 on the 2016 Bacon Top 31

December 02, 2016 by Royal Stuart

Barbara Barbara, We Face a Shining Future by Underworld

Oh how the mighty have fallen. If this were the early nineties, I’d be putting my absolute favorite “electronic music” band up near the top of the chart. But today, I feel as though I’m simply throwing them a bone because, hey, the old guys are still willing to give it a shot.

You know the Underworld. “Born Slippy .NUXX,” the outro of the 1996 movie Trainspotting, was the song of an entire generation, able to finally breath after the claustrophobia of our childhood, graduating into our own future. Barbara Barbara, the band’s ninth album in their 28 year history, will feel very familiar to anyone that has heard Underworld before. I believe this to be a fantastic album, just one that I no longer am able to connect with like I did in my twenties. So, to the second-to-last-spot on the Top 31 they go, a Second Toughest of the Infants no longer.

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31. Preoccupations by Preoccupations

In May 2013 at a nondescript Seattle space called 1927 Events, two-thirds of Magic Mountain High—Germany's David Moufang (aka Move D) and the Netherlands' Jordan Czamanski of Juju & Jordash—teamed up for a live performance that made everyone in the room feel privileged to have witnessed it. It was the kind of set during which you say to yourself, “I hope to hell somebody's recording this.” Thankfully, somebody was doing just that, and the 99-minute Live In Seattle is the sterling result. People throw around the word “deep” to describe electronic music with cavalier frequency, but in the case of Moufang and Czamanski (who also records as Jordan GCZ), that adjective barely encapsulates the kind of fathomless sound they create. Their work as Magic Mountain High—which includes Juju & Jordash's Gal Aner—combines the two artists' spring-loaded, psychedelic techno and libido-stoking house, exponentially multiplying their propulsive and disorienting qualities. Live In Seattle captures them working at the zenith of their improvisational powers for a rabid crowd—despite their European gear not functioning and having to use unfamiliar equipment, which is a testament to the pair's ability to create and adjust on the fly. The show begins with anticipatory cymbal taps and a beautifully morose melodica motif that wouldn't sound out of place in an Ennio Morricone soundtrack. A few minutes in, faint pulses enter earshot and a minute later the clap-enhanced beats and synth bass burst into the forefront to form a strutting midtempo rhythm with a subliminal drone swirling beneath it. Masters of dynamics, Moufang and Czamanski incrementally intensify and ingeniously arrange the elements, especially that underlying keyboard drone, until you're in a state of panic and ecstasy. Over the course of the set, the two producers flaunt their expertise for pacing. They avoid the obvious and subvert expectations throughout the performance, sporadically letting the beats drop out in order to luxuriate on a particularly alien organ oscillation (see especially the one near the beginning of the vinyl version of Live In Seattle's A-side), a sinister bass rumble, an ominously pulsating synth, an unsettling thumb piano motif, or a mind-warping 303 acid ripple, to name just a handful of examples. Of course, Moufang and Czamanski also keep things danceable for stretches of time and about 78 minutes in, they even shift out of their foundation of oddity and into heavenly techno mode with a gloriously ascendant melody (which you can hear on the B-side of the vinyl version). For their well-deserved encore, Moufang and Czamanski reprise the intro's mournful melodica reverie and then infiltrate it with a series of percolating and disorienting bleeps and a celestial drone worthy of New Age legend Laraaji. This stellar ambient coda reflects Moufang and Czamanski's exceptional, eccentric musicality. Techno is not known for its live albums, but regardless, Live In Seattle sets the standard for the format. With its abundant and sublime tunefulness, textural richness, and enchantingly enigmatic tangents, Live In Seattle takes you on a trip that's as long, strange, and stimulating as anything Miles Davis' electric bands of the '70s engineered.

#30 on the 2015 Bacon Top 31

December 02, 2015 by Royal Stuart

Live in Seattle by Moufang / Czamanski

Time was, I would listen to “techno” music all the time. Underworld, the Orb, Aphex Twin, Orbital, Chemical Bros. — this was the world I lived in. And I’d find myself at a club, every weekend, gyrating and flailing (I’m not sure I should call it “dancing”) to whatever the DJ was spinning. But that was the 90s, and things are quite a bit different for me now.

Musical tastes change, priorities shift, and the prospect of doing something akin to exercise past 11pm on any given night no longer brings the appeal it used to. But every so often I come across something that brings that drive, that desire to move, back. Enter Germany’s David Moufang (aka Move D) and the Netherlands’ Jordan Czamanski (aka Jordan GCZ, also of Juju & Jordash), collectively known as Moufang / Czamanski.¹

Performed back in May 2013 but not released until October of this year, this set is the definition of background music. Put it on, and watch yourself become more effective at your behind-the-screen desk job. But be careful, because you may hit a point (probably around the 78-minute mark) where you find yourself bouncing in your seat, taken out of whatever it is you were typing, fully immersed in this digital landscape.

^{1. Add in a second Nederlander, Gal Aner, also of Juju & Jordash, and you get yet another group: Magic Mountain High. Check them all out.↩}

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31. High by Royal Headache

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