It was 1999, and Underworld were in a dangerous place. After two decades of ups and downs—they’d been dropped by labels and management, gone deeply into debt, and cycled through four different band names—Underworld had become what they’d decided they never wanted to be again: a real band.
This was a significant change of fortunes from just six years prior. When Rick Smith and Karl Hyde, bandmates since 1979, and a DJ named Darren Emerson, a little more than 10 years their junior, released the trio’s landmark 1993 album Dubnobasswithmyheadman, they were starting from scratch. After getting turned on to the UK’s acid-house scene and abandoning the unfashionable, high-gloss pop-rock of Underworld’s previous iteration, they’d spent the previous couple of years recording a series of dance singles that they sold out of the back of their car.
Underworld weren’t a natural fit for the rave scene—there was Smith and Hyde’s age, for one thing, along with Hyde’s rambling, stream-of-consciousness vocals—but somehow, they struck a chord. Dubnobasswithmyheadman anticipated a growing desire for what’s sometimes been called “progressive house,” but in their case just meant a sound that was psychedelic and enveloping, with a little bit more personality than much of the era’s dance music. (Melody Maker called it a “breathtaking hybrid [that] marks the moment that club culture finally comes of age and beckons to everyone.”) Second Toughest in the Infants, the second album from their new incarnation, burrowed deeper into their moody psychogeography and fueled their continued upward trajectory with critics and fans. Then came Trainspotting. Getting “Born Slippy .NUXX”—until then, a B-side that had attracted little attention—onto the film’s soundtrack earned the band a whole new set of fans, particularly in America, where their vestigial rock trappings poured a spoonful of sugar over the bitter pill of unfamiliar rave beats.
Inspired by rave’s parallel economy—a world apart, massive but underground, with few ties to the old-guard music industry—Underworld had set out to remain independent. But their success, ironically, found them absorbed back into the pop music machine. Beaucoup Fish, the best-selling Underworld album, is fascinating precisely for the ways in which it captures them at a moment of ambivalence.
In many ways, the ’99 record represents a logical extension of their previous two albums. Track lengths have shrunk a bit—there’s certainly nothing like the pair of 15- and 16-minute colossi that kicked off Second Toughest—but they feel long, with tumbling synth arpeggios pushing forward like great big sawtoothed corkscrews. Even at just four and a half minutes long, the barreling piano house of “Push Upstairs” seems epic. And the way the 12-minute opener “Cups” cycles through its different phases even feels like a DJ set in miniature.
On balance, it’s the heaviest of the trio lineup’s three albums. One of the principal takeaways from this remastered reissue is how thrillingly fast techno used to be: Most of the proper club cuts here hover around a blistering 140 beats per minute, and their drum work pulls no punches. Underworld had always taken pride in their idiosyncratic approach: “The purists all hated us, because we were so eclectic,” Hyde told SPIN. But the only thing standing between “Moaner” and techno’s textbook definition is Hyde ranting, “Get the sound in your head/Black metal walls are crawling/I am the hunger above your town,” like a sidewalk preacher beneath his end-of-days sandwich board. (Another revelation here is how much, in retrospect, Sleaford Mods owe to Hyde’s imagistic armchair-sociologist shtick.) “Kittens,” ironic title aside, is an even more straight-down-the-middle take on boomy, big-room techno, albeit fleshed out with pastel-colored shoegaze guitars—part rave, part rocket launch. Blame it on the crash cymbals, maybe, but the track’s atmospherics have aged far better than the beats. The best of the bangers is undoubtedly “Shudder / King of Snake,” which riffs on the bassline of “I Feel Love” and adds bare-knuckled chord stabs and so much percussion that it sounds like a street fight between rival samba schools. There’s not a tougher piano-house track in the annals of Ibiza.
Despite the trio’s significantly raised profile, Beaucoup Fish makes surprisingly few overtures to pop. The only thing that comes close is “Bruce Lee,” a 100-BPM breakbeat tune that takes after big-beat contemporaries like the Chemical Brothers and Fatboy Slim. Still, there’s no melody to speak of, just an atonal clank buttressed by turntablist scratching. Hyde’s lyrics, which resemble scrambled advertising copy (“Life kid suck/Drink from the box/The juice kicks up/Live give suck the box drink/Yeeaaaah”) are “pop” only in the way Warhol’s soup cans were pop. More intriguing might be two nearly ambient sketches, “Winjer” and “Skym,” that set Hyde against a backdrop of synths and little else. Both songs suggest the lengths the group was willing to go to test listeners’ expectations; that they sequenced the two songs side by side on the album only reinforces what a curiously atmospheric vision they were pursuing.
The album’s most exciting and enduring moments are the ones that pair this suggestive ambient energy with their rhythmic instincts. “Cups” teases a hint of that: Hyde’s bluesy, vocodered melody swirls like colored smoke over one of the album’s most hypnotic grooves, and incidental keys sparkle like the light from a disco ball. “Something Like a Mama” smoothes over its tumbling breakbeats with soft sunrise pads, and the unresolved qualities of its bass-and-synthesizer counterpoints give the track an unmistakably searching feel. And then there’s “Jumbo,” one of the two or three most affecting tracks in their entire catalog. It’s as fast as anything on the album, fueled by crisp, snapping drums and a spring-loaded bassline, yet it feels like falling upward through clouds, like a midsummer snowstorm. It’s here that they truly made good on the immersive, otherworldly potential that always inhabited their music; it’s here that they outdid themselves as makers of extroverted music for introverts, of rave anthems for people happiest alone in their heads.
The extras on the 4x-CD expanded edition comprise mainly alternate takes and DJ remixes. The latter are mainly of interest to collectors. Unless you’re a working drum ‘n’ bass DJ, chances are you don’t need both a vocal mix and an instrumental of DJ Hype & DJ Zinc’s jump-up reworking of “Bruce Lee.” (That said, the techno titan Dave Clarke’s “King of Snake” remix, which folds “It Takes Two”-style hiccups and a bizarrely backmasked cymbal into the original’s rushing chord stabs, is truly a thing to behold.)
The alternate takes are not much more essential, but they offer an intriguing glimpse of any number of possible albums that Beaucoup Fish might have turned out to be. “Skym - A A1317 Nov 97” plays out like an unplugged rehearsal for keys, brushed drums, and Hyde’s unadorned voice. “Bruce Lee - Ricks 1st Dobro Mix” pitches the tune up by a half-step or so and adds silvery steel guitar to the mix. And “Jumbo - Diff Bass 2 A1317 Nov 97” sounds virtually identical to the album version, but without the bright synths and cutting bassline of the latter, it feels like a dimmer switch has been turned down; it’s good, but it doesn’t come anywhere close to the glories of the canonical version.
Hyde has complained that by Beaucoup Fish, some of the “rough edges” had come off their work. “We’re getting a bit professional,” he said of that period. “And by that I mean less intuitive, and more streamlined.” Yet what the outtakes show is how easily it all could have gone wrong. The album’s best tracks, like “Jumbo,” are the most streamlined ones; the album is most successful when it strikes a balance between their habitual grit and a newfound polish. Perhaps they never meant to come back as a real band, but the best of Beaucoup Fish finds them at the height of their powers.
