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Underworld are one of those bands who do things their own way. I respect them for that, although i suppose that not everyone approves of such constant change. Well, after the release of 100 Days Off, Hyde and Smith have started releasing "bundles" on their website. And by bundle they mean, "a half hour mix of a few songs along with some photos wrapped in a simple HTML gallery type of framework". They plan on releasing one of these every month or so. Pizza For Eggs is the second of these, but it is the first one that i have downloaded.
I downloaded this one because, well, i liked the samples that are posted for free listening on the website. As is typical for Underworld, this is pretty cool music.
Theoretically the 25:07 minutes worth of music are divided into 6 "songs", but they flow seamlessly together. It's hard for me to wrap my head around the notion that there are 6 "songs" here, really. There are four distinct portions of the music. I am not sure how these correspond to songs... Really, this is all very confusing to me. If there are 6 songs, why is there only 1 MP3 file, and why are there only 4 free samples? Urgh.
Anyway, as i said, it's pretty darn cool. Pizza For Eggs starts out with a strange ambience of chugging beats and effected keyboards with Hyde singing under a ton of distortion and echo. The lyrics are his typical impressionistic nonsense, but it goes very well with the nice dub beat of the tune and the slow tinkling organ. It builds slowly, adding in more traditional drum work, stronger keyboards, and a bit of Smith's heavily effected guitar. Nice. And then, suddenly at about 7 minutes into Pizza For Eggs, this song crossfades into an old school dub tune. There is a nice head loping beat that sounds like it could have come from a King Tubby disc. The bass riff in particular is very nice here. Over this, Underworld layer some funky keys and echoed voice.
The dub only lasts for about 3 minutes before fading into a steady bongo beat. Hyde is singing here with tremendous tremolo, his voice a blur. A beat slowly grows over the next 4 minutes, then the song transforms into something with tinkling piano and a rich, chugging beat. I really like the piano part of Pizza For Eggs, as Underworld move along at a frenetic pace. Cool stuff. Finally, that section fades into a vocals and ambience outro that parallels the intro bit, providing a nice closure.
This is typical Underworld. The music here reminds me a lot of their classic album Second Toughest In the Infants, well, the mellower portions of that release at least. If you have liked their previous releases, you'll like Pizza For Eggs.
The bundle also comes with 444 images. Apparently Karl Hyde wanders around with a digital camera constantly taking pictures. A lot of the photos here are of concrete and buildings. I don't get this kind of stuff, but i do know people who take digital shots like that. Their argument for having so many photos is "Why not? Storing them is so cheap!" Personally, i feel that not everything needs to be photographed... So, whatever Karl...
One final note: i paid Underworld 5 pounds to download this. That's about US$8 for 25 minutes worth of music and some photos shot by a hyperactive man with a digital camera. The cost seems a bit high to me... Then again, i am skeptical as to the whole "paying for a download" process. So, i pay money for something that i cannot hold in my hand? Weird. Still, they are trying something different, and that i fully approve of. And the music is good…
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