August 8, 2008? Yeah, I know. Ok, here's the explanation, really. A few days ago, I bought a $1500 20oz Pepsi. This particular Pepsi, unlike the stock market, jumped from its initial price of $2 when I accidentally spilled it all over my laptop, thus destroying it (immediate shutdown, internal fans blowing, frothy brown liquid seeping out the USB ports.) So what does a mad hatter do? He dismantles the thing to salvage anything of importance, remounts the hard drive to another computer and saves the data for future use on his now current and brand spank-me-daddy new laptop. Why I am telling you this? Because, well, restoring your data engenders this habit of perusing random files, and therefore, my tortured readers, I found this review, which I didn't post during my Radiohead lovefest way back when. Truth be told, Underworld deserves some lovin' anyway, even if what I'm about to post below is very short. Oh, and I promise some new content soon; I'm being a procrastinating self-aggregating information junkie. Pffft.
Playing right before Radiohead kind of sucks. When almost an entire festival shows up right before the main attraction, you've potentially got a very impatient audience. Underworld didn't seem to care, blitzing everyone with an hour-long barrage of carefully selected intensity. Each song, to its sometimes detriment, was about nine or ten minutes apiece. I say detriment because this stuff, while very good, is still heady and extremely hard to listen to back to back to back. Repetition only goes so far sometimes without much variation. That said, there were several moments of excellence, namely the inflatable white columns amidst the ferocious "Two Months Off," singer Karl Hyde's frantic hand-held camera histrionics to the madness of "Cowgirl" and my favorite boom boom beat in "Jumbo." Oh, "Shudder/King Of Snake" was fucking wicked, too. Very good song selection from their catalog, perhaps not sequenced quite right and definitely could have benefitted from the evening dark rather than daylight. B-
Here's most of the setlist:
Glam Bucket
Cowgirl
Pearl's Girl
Jumbo
Two Months Off
Born Slippy .NUXX
Shudder/King Of Snake
Moaner
