Bad Rap Music Review: Oblivion with Bells

Underworld's new album has been catching a lot of undeserved flack. Critics are calling it not up to snuff with Dubnobasswithmyheadman, Second Toughest in the Infants, and Beaucoup Fish; calling it an unbelievable disappointment. They're lumping this album in the same basket as Hundred Days off; saying the band has lost something since Darren Emerson's departure. Of course, everyone knows that it's never cool to like a band's new album. Everything ways always better back in the "Hay-Day". And that's the other major point of this, there's much talk of Electronica's hay-day as well. To those people, I say wake up. Electronica, as you mainstream media types like to call it, didn't go anywhere or stop being good just because you stopped paying attention to it when the hype around it died down in the late nineties. Lets face it, the only electronic music you think is good these days is the stuff you hear on car and ipod commercials. Just shut up and go back to listening to Crunk.

Back to underworld, there's also a lot of critics who like write as if "Born Slippy" from the Trainspotting soundtrack was the only worthwhile thing they did and everything else is just background noise. Sure, even to underworld fans this was a hit, but by no stretch was it their only hit.

The new album, Oblivion with Bells, is right up there in quality with the rest of their work (Yes, including Hundred Days Off). There isn't a bad song to be found on this album. My only complaint might be that theirs only 10 songs, and a couple of those are short ambient segways into other tracks. I'm not going to go into details about the specific songs, but just remember it's pretty much never a good idea to listen to mainstream music critics (I'm talking to you Rolling Stone). Most of the time they write as if they hate all music and would rather be in a different profession.