Oblivion With Bells

A kind of band you can trust

Nineties take a very special place in the history of electronics. It was the time when this branch of music ripped through the blockades of mainstream and won over a piece of popular culture. Like any other young phenomenon, electronic music was honest and open and lavishly showered its admirers with great bands that could really struggle for the place in charts. Massive Attack, The Prodigy, The Chemical Brothers – they are all from nineties. But today, more than a decade later, everything has changed; electronic music has faded, grew dim a little and gradually lost its cold, futuristic coloring of early days, well, at least when speaking about really prominent acts of this genre, those who can carry true values of this music to the wide audience. It's not like British electronic duo Underworld can be considered an incarnation of hopes for old fans of light electronic, but still, this is that kind of a band you can trust to. Underworld behave pretty active and since 1989 they have released a huge amount of sufficiently popular records. Their most popular album Second Toughest In The Infants was released in 1996, some of its tracks appeared in a popular movie Trainspottinng. This year Underworld recorded their new album Oblivion With Bells.

The musicians paid a lot of attention to vocals

Overall, the material represented on Oblivion With Bells sounds pretty positive, soft and favors leisured contemplation. The album opens with a mid tempo techno composition Crocodile filled with a whole mass of psychedelic keyboards and haunted vocals. As a whole, this track sounds vast and thoughtful even despite its fervent beat. In fact, this album features a little bit exaggerated range of the sound and beat frequently perform just auxiliary functions and sometimes absents at all. For example, a track called To Heal sounds very corresponding to its title and it wouldn't be out of place on the compilation of music for meditation – this is a very peculiar cinematic ambient. However, this example is rather an exception, basically Underworld achieve the effect of sonic unreality using beat either, like they did on a half tribal track Faxed Innovation. The musicians paid a lot of attention to vocals on this album and it presents almost in every single track. The most successful in this sense is probably Boy, Boy, Boy.

A little bit of everything

Speaking about the album as a whole Oblivion With Bells looks sufficiently consistent. Perhaps some of the tracks may sound different in their characters but still they all submit to some similar relaxation spirit. Don't forget that Underworld's members are not that young and it reflects in their music in any event. As for the place this album takes in Underworld's discography, Oblivion With Bells is a sort of a look in the past, it has lots of things that may remind of their artistic visions of late 90's, although everything is represented in a more modest way. Underworld made an album that contains a little bit of everything. It has techno and ambient, some tints of old school electronica and some progressive elements and the main thing is that this album can always raise your spirits, it sounds pretty emotional and positive. Still, the general effect is quite ambiguous: you can feel the material's high potential but it lacks something all the same, perhaps, the main problem here is the absence of a properly bright track. Everything sounds great but hit song is missing. However, old fans of Underworld will certainly find this album a worthy record, which carries lots of great features that once made this duo so popular.