Strawberry Hotel - Dirty reviews

[ultradave]

Originally Posted by TheBang

Shin-kan-sen (pronounce kan as Khan)

Thank you for the phonetics. I was totally mispronouncing it! . After some more time I do have to say it's growing on me because of its solid tracks. Will this be a go to album for me? No, but the standouts will be on regular rotation for sure. In whole it does make sense for me in a way that none of their other albums have, especially mid-album from Lewis to Harlem with Hilo right there in-between. As far as the vocals on some of the tracks - I feel it's totally intentional because Karl can still hold a solid note. King of Harlem has totally grown on me - the lyrics are catchy and at first I was like WTF... but that bouncy beat - gotta love it! Ottavia is so different I give it to Esme for the emotion in that track. That shriek in Lewis feels more like agony and pain than an O, but that's just me, it's still unsettling. It will likely fall to the wayside. I find it interesting that they decided to close the album with an acoustic number, but it really closes out this album.

[aphasein]

And as a follow-up here's my final album cover that I'll be using for my gently remade SH. I use the artist's own work of the period, sometimes swapping out completed covers from a related single release (actually pretty rare compared to swapping audio, and haven't done this for UW before apart from letting the Drift single covers be their album collection covers).

For this one, it's a still from their Denver Luna video that had the same colors as the actual album cover and with the magenta circles pattern kind of suggesting an abstract strawberry. Couldn't get the source resolution above 1000px due to this, but think it's good enough for digital use. The title stack is based on the back of their new album shirts and placed similar to the single covers. Your mileage will vary...

[dubman]

Originally Posted by aphasein

IDK, I think the genie has been out of the bottle for a while now on remaking music - with it mainly being a digital form now for most of the audience, the democratization and easy availability of digital editing tools, and internet culture being what it is, it's definitely going to happen and often more extremely. The good news is it's generally done by passionate fans who are engaged and excited by the work (that's who is going to put in the effort and want to share it), but I also get the questionable nature and ambiguity of it.

I also see it as an extension of mixtape/playlists/DJ-culture (which Underworld is a huge part of), with DJ's making their own edits/selections/remixes. Autechre famously started out in the 80's by making pause-button edits at home to "tighten-up" (as they said) their favorite tracks to play to friends, which led to deeper remixing, then inserting their own compositions in their mixtapes and later DJ sets. The electro culture lent itself to this, but it also just happened anyway by people finding their own means and stepping up. Autechre are about to drop a new collection of live sets in place of an album (their words) and some fans will soon be chopping them up and enjoying that as well.

I know for myself it's something I really enjoy both the process of and end results of, and is something I probably can't turn off easily. I don't really consider myself a musician, but as a music producer I've done a ton of editing of my friends' work and collaborate mainly by suggesting or physically making edits (and I have written a few albums worth of tracks solo, but they've still mainly felt like editing as well). I'm a creative director in my day job, so spend the day recommending, deciding or physically making edits to other designer's work. And as an avid collector, I really love curation, which sometimes extends beyond the initial object into related items, and making decisions about fit and relevancy.

I think I have probably remade about 1/4 of my favorite albums, generally just dropping tracks, re-sequencing for better flow, and/or occasionally pulling in b-sides from same sessions to replace tracks when seems to fit better. Already re-sequenced the new Pixies album which also dropped yesterday to give it more energy upfront (and does our loose cultural/narrative preference for energy to kick things off and quiet/beautiful/slower endings stem actually from the limitations of vinyl, which preferred denser more bombastic songs physically be placed first and quiet songs last on the more limited inner bands, or is it more inherently intrinsic?) Is the album version definitive or the single edit that more people will probably hear and know? Or the live version that gets refined and settles more into itself sometimes from the comparatively early on album one?

I don't participate in any other online communities, so please forgive the occasional diatribes, but obviously something important to me that I care and think a lot about. I have totally redone Drift as I shared here, but other than that, for the albums, I've only adjusted Barking by replacing Diamond Jigsaw with Downpipe and dropping Louisiana (which really makes the whole thing quite a stomper). I've been there for every new release since Second Toughest and love the surprises (and still love most of SH), but I'd be lying if I didn't take stock of it feeling and fitting oddly different this time. IDK, still very exciting overall.

I feel like we're talking about different things if we're comparing this to DJ edits and remixes. those embrace the original and rearrange the furniture so that it'll fit a set, or reveal its compatibility to other genres.

I'm also not saying that rearranging or cherry-picking tracks is off-base. I have playlist folders for bands like Underworld that constantly de&re-contextualize and build a vision of an era as I understand & love it. I hate certain tracks like Boy, Boy, Boy, but I never thought to fuck with it to make it fit. I just ignore it. They can't all be winners.

What's going on here is taking ones antipathy to a track and making it more digestible. It doesn't even try to get inside of it, it doesn't respect it with the time it deserves, it just rejects the difficulty and starts aligning it with what we're comfortable with. it's depressing, a waste of dialogue, and frankly embarrassing that we get more inflexible with age than the band themselves.

[potatobroth]

Originally Posted by ultradave

Karl can still hold a solid note.

Really? He can hold a LOW note, but almost every high note on this album sounds 'wrong' to me. Or intentionally wrong? Which is totally baffling. I just heard Velvet Does for the first time and oh man, its just more of this weird out-of-key singing.

[Dunwho]

Hello all... Been a while!

First couple of full listens this week. Overall I am positive - think its a really confident release with a strong direction and lots of the different directions they've been going in since OWB seem to be resolving into a clear Underworld (Mk.4?) sound.

Main positives:
Ottavia is a triumph of an experiment. It has such drama in both the reading and the music. I really enjoy listening to it an imagining the stage performance.

They appear to have landed on a progressive techno sound which I personally really enjoy. At its core most songs have a central groove or melody/pattern that they grown and augment throughout. I think of Rowla, Moaner, Spoonman in those instances... But on top of this they've seem to have resolved a sound they developed for Barking and BB which has this more refined structure that is bass melody driven. Barking was a very confident album in a direction I really disliked (chorus/verse pop type consumable tunes) and this seems like a confident thrust in a different direction. An experimental, dance focused experience that I can imagine would be fantastic to hear live.

Negatives:
I think it is too long and the balance of bangers to the fore and more experimental to the back is not my favourite. I feel the album could have ended with Ottavia and by then i start to get quite tired... With a 9 min trance tune still to come I found it just dragged a bit. Felt like a full album and then 4-5 bonus tracks. I'd almost cut out 2-3 tracks and bring forward some of the songs near the end to break up the energy slightly.

But overall I really like it.

Let me try and place it:
1. STITI
2. DUBNO
3. BF
4. OWB
5. SH
6. AHDO
7. BB
8. Drift
9. Barking

Was not sure to include drift there... 'd almost also include rhe riverrun series then... But i'd love to just emphasise how bottom of the list of everything Barking is.. its right down there... Underneath the Radar is higher than barking in my book.

[34958hq439-qjw9v5jq298v5j]

Listened for the first time last night. Found it really impressive. I can get why old school fans wouldn't like it, it really does not sound like UW albums of the past, it sounds like they rebuilt everything from the ground up this past decade and this is sort of the culmination of that. Yet at the same time it's stuffed with references to old Underworld tracks, not just lyrically but a lot of the exact sounds are there. Kinda adds to the dreamlike vibe of the album, it sounds very new but it still constantly reminds you it's Underworld.

The sequencing of the album is pretty interesting to me. It flows together but in an odd way. Very stream-of-consciousness. I agree with the other comments that the last 5 tracks feel like a separate EP. Great stuff - "Gene Pool" especially - but I think the album does work with "Ottavia" as the final track too.

[aphasein]

Originally Posted by dubman

I feel like we're talking about different things if we're comparing this to DJ edits and remixes. those embrace the original and rearrange the furniture so that it'll fit a set, or reveal its compatibility to other genres.

I'm also not saying that rearranging or cherry-picking tracks is off-base. I have playlist folders for bands like Underworld that constantly de&re-contextualize and build a vision of an era as I understand & love it. I hate certain tracks like Boy, Boy, Boy, but I never thought to fuck with it to make it fit. I just ignore it. They can't all be winners.

What's going on here is taking ones antipathy to a track and making it more digestible. It doesn't even try to get inside of it, it doesn't respect it with the time it deserves, it just rejects the difficulty and starts aligning it with what we're comfortable with. it's depressing, a waste of dialogue, and frankly embarrassing that we get more inflexible with age than the band themselves.

I get it, but think we're mainly talking about things differently here than talking about different things, and have a different degree of comfort with them, and I'd say, with real respect, that inflexibility can go both ways.

As mentioned, I've never actually done this for UW before and have done it because I'm engaged in the work, and don't want to ignore or drop it because I don't hate it, I actually deeply like it apart from specific elements that make it suddenly lose momentum and drop me out of the spell it's cast.

In the case of Lewis, the vocal runs are kind of integral to the drop-out sections though, and I still hear them in my head, as I figured, so have gone back to the original track. Love the cut-up processing they do on the third refrain of it, which doesn't dominate or feel like it goes on too long like the full raw vocal. Still think Iron Bones is stronger without the processed third vocal refrain and feels more like a single edit with the ending trimmed a little shorter. Funny that they both have a structure of 3 vocal refrains with the third one heavily processed and causing opposite reactions for me.

So why share this? I'm mainly DJing for an audience of one (which I'd say dropping and re-arranging tracks also is), but like Autechre sharing their edits with friends of songs recorded off the radio they tightened up, it seemed like a partially receptive audience here, with others mentioning their issues with the vocal runs in Lewis and album overall hitting them strange, but loving many parts of it. We're obviously all passionate about it.

...

One thing I haven't really seen mentioned much yet, and maybe better to focus on, is how hard a lot of the tracks go - haven't felt that in a long time actually (mainly Border Country recently). Denver Luna, Colour Red, Sweet Lands, Hilo Sky are all fairly intense with Hilo up there with Dirty Epic and Beautiful Burnout. Even Techno Shinkansen and Lewis go there in their builds (especially Lewis in the end third, that was quite a surprise after it's smooth groove). Nothing Moaner or Push Upstairs level of course, but still, impressive.

[dubman]

Originally Posted by aphasein

As mentioned, I've never actually done this for UW before and have done it because I'm engaged in the work, and don't want to ignore or drop it because I don't hate it, I actually deeply like it apart from specific elements that make it suddenly lose momentum and drop me out of the spell it's cast.

this doesn't sound like engagement though, it sounds like molding underworld because you don't like what they've done. That sounds like recoiling from any true engagement.

[negative1]

i too, like hearing underworlds tracks in my own way..
--

the one thing that may or most likely isnt coming, is a deluxe version
with all kinds of extra tracks
---
i ve gotten used to:
--
alternate versions - demos
instrumentals
remixes

so, for this, i've made an instrumental sampler (about 40 minutes)
of the great keyboard layers, shimmering synths, pounding beats,
and a few vocals thrown in (colour red), all mixed into one flowing
track. i left off most of the slower ones though..




made a separate instrumental version of all the tracks too.

along with an all acapella version.. now thats interesting...

later
|| | || | |
n egative 1

[purlieu]

Originally Posted by Dunwho

Overall I am positive - think its a really confident release with a strong direction and lots of the different directions they've been going in since OWB seem to be resolving into a clear Underworld (Mk.4?) sound.

This is a great point, ad something I agree with. I wouldn't say the last few albums sound tentative or scared, but they don't sound as confident as the band at their peak. BB's shortness, Barking's safeness and collaborations, Drift's lack of willingness to commit to a distinct album. SH definitely sounds like it knows what it is and why it is that.