why don't you poll me I feel like flying to... the UNDERWORLD Poll Results thread -- produced by Smith & Hyde for ILM Artist Poll #102

My number 2 behind the actual best song ever made

hard to pick a favorite track with Underworld, but Jumbo is right up there

I had no idea this song was so highly rated!

glad to see appreciation for the monster tracks from Beaucoup Fish

love how Cups evolves from a low-key track to a synth freakout after 9 minutes

as if karl groaning "here comes christ on crutches" wasn't one of the more off-putting moments in their discography.

tim this opinion breaks my heart

this was my no. 3, after "beautiful burnout" and "8 ball." idk if it's weird that i think it's the most romantic song i've ever heard

https://i.ibb.co/D1bhFKk/uw-bdo-2003-02headbob.gif

heads up to the "combining votes is cheating" partisans:

https://i.ibb.co/D1bhFKk/uw-bdo-2003-02headbob.gif

if we didn't combine votes for anything, including the next track

https://i.ibb.co/D1bhFKk/uw-bdo-2003-02headbob.gif

then the next title would be your #1

https://i.ibb.co/3F9rjKJ/uw-bdo-2003-03armsout.gif

http://ghostfood.uk/public/ilx/underworld/u004-885633.png

4. Juanita: Kiteless: To Dream of Love
1706 points, 24 votes, 4 #1s
1996 album opener from Second Toughest In The Infants

audio
live audio 1996
live video 2018 (link at 0:08)

TOO LOW

awesome

Sure, I know this observation is ridiculously dated, but when Karl Hyde strikes those two shimmering chords on his guitar five minutes deep into "Juanita" [Everything, Everything] over what sounds like a celestial choir of frantic, chirping calculators, it's positively euphoric in a manner normally reserved for Spielbergian encounters with extraterrestrials. Put simply, it rocks furiously and makes me oh so happy.

― Alex in NYC, Friday, August 1, 2003 4:46 PM

partly i think the danceability of second toughest is subtle yet powerful- the repetitive figures of the "juanita/kiteless" opening block at first just make you bounce around a little bit, jiggle a leg in your seat or whatever, but by later you're humming along with the vocoder and it picks up speed. this is opposed to the danceability of, say, "push upstairs," which just starts bashing down the door and forcing you to dance with the detroit-ness of it all and builds even more on that.

― .rob, Tuesday, June 29, 2004 3:30 PM

zz top used "juanita" as their intro music the other night, i shit u not

― roxymuzak, Monday, September 21, 2009 9:09 PM

Also, I love how 'Juanita/Kiteless/To Dream of Love' is over quarter of an hour long but still feels like it's over in the blink of an eye to me. No matter how many times I've heard it, it always feels far more shorter than it actually is.

― Turrican, Wednesday, November 11, 2015 9:18 AM

Oh wow I thought those would be 1 and 2

was wondering if you were referring to Rez/Cowgirl, haven't been following closely enough to know it they showed up

Love this one. Can't stand King of Snake, personally. I know.

always thought of Shudder/King of Snake as one track

tbf there are approx 973 versions of Snake without Shudder

I do like the way Underworld merges tracks to make a bigger picture

too low

moral victory

lol i like voted for "rez" and "cowgirl" separately so i'm assuming "cowgirl" took it

i also thought i voted for "tin there" and "pearl's girl" separately but... i sure didn't :(

77 tracks is so long for a ballot i figured something would get deleted by accident

i also voted for "dirty epic" really high

poll still impossible to predict

I think my experience of Rez/Cowgirl as one track was from Everything, Everything

Copy from the 2014 vinyl single refers to them as "sister" songs. Hmmmmmmmm.

https://www.discogs.com/Underworld-Rez/release/5955412

I'm A Big Sister, And I'm A Cowgirl, And I'm A Princess And This Is My Rez

Dark & Long and Dark Train of course being cousins

Copy on the Rowla / Cherry Jam read Since their release in the late 90’s it’s always been clear that Cherry Pie and Rowla were two tunes cut from the same cloth.

as if karl groaning "here comes christ on crutches" wasn't one of the more off-putting moments in their discography.

tim this opinion breaks my heart

― mellon collie and the infinite bradness (BradNelson), Tuesday, 23 June 2020 01:09 (fifty-two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

soz, when I bought dubno it was the track I liked most first off, but (while I still like it a lot) it just strikes me as being a bit obvious and on the nose with its big emotional pull. So I ended up voting for "Dirty Guitar" instead (so lol I guess I'm part of the problem I was complaining about).

whereas "jumbo" tacks hard in the opposite direction: karl sings quieter and the effect is to imbue every word, every precisely-enunciated "click" with a sense of calibrated emotional heft.

i'd never really thought of "dirty epic" and "jumbo" as being particularly comparable, they're more one-offs in terms of feelings to me that they've never quite done anything else like either.

Also now that "Juanita" has placed (too low of course) can someone explain to me how the track actually breaks down into the two/three sections?

I've generally assumed that Juanita is the first section, Kiteless is the part beginning "There is a sound on the other side of this wall", and "To Dream of Love" is just the high-pitched recitation of colours at the end?

that's always been my understanding, since "To Dream of Love" doesn't appear on the Everything, Everything tracklisting and that's the part that's missing

whereas "jumbo" tacks hard in the opposite direction: karl sings quieter and the effect is to imbue every word, every precisely-enunciated "click" with a sense of calibrated emotional heft.

― Tim F, Monday, June 22, 2020 7:10 PM (ten minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is correct and why "jumbo" is superior yes

"only these wires" still gives me the chills

a lot of their great tracks have a sense of withheld but ready to burst ecstasy

today's results very o_O to me. no one's fired but i'm going to need some time to recover.

i don't think there's really a clear breakdown of which part is which. the "juanita (promo short cut)" edit is a minute of the middle breakdown section (which incidentally is mostly missing from the everything, everything version - there's only a short excerpt of it at the end that transitions into the "cups" end section) edited into three minutes of the "there is a sound on the other side of this wall" part

http://ghostfood.uk/public/ilx/underworld/u003-899161.png


3. Pearl's Girl and Tin There
1955 combined points, 37 total votes from 24 out of 25 voters, 2 #1s (and 1 #1 for Tin There as a standalone)
1996 album track Second Toughest In The Infants JBOLP4
remixed as 1996 12" JBO38
remixed again as B-side 1996 12" JBO 45
B-side remix edited for Playstation Wipeout 2097
edit re-edited for soundtrack CD CDV2815


official video by Dylan Kendle and Graham Wood
offical live video Rijksmuseum 2017
webcast video 2006
Pearl's Girl (Tin There) audio

oh wow too low

OTM OTM OTM OTM and incidentally this is why "Pearl's Girl" is the only track on the album that works.

_Second Toughest..._ comes across like they took the miniscule edge of _dubnobass..._ and sanded it off of every track, leaving a completely innoffensive and uninvolving puddle of bland (with the SOLE exception of "Pearl's Girl"); the entire reason why most of those songs work better in a live situation is because beefed up through a gigantic club system with all of the live filter processing and feedback inherent in the setup the tracks regain bite and crispness. I first heard most of the _Second Toughest..._ material live at one of their shows in support of the album and was DEEPLY LET DOWN by the faceless blancmange that they put in the stores, so I basically turned back to the drum n bass CDs that were piling up next to my stereo and wrote them off for YEARS.

― DJP, Tuesday, June 29, 2004 10:12 PM

anyway, here's 26 minutes of "Pearl's Girl"

https://soundcloud.com/underworld/pearls-girl-jam-080624

― frogbs, Friday, May 17, 2019 3:38 AM

fuck

― BradNelson, Friday, May 17, 2019 3:39 AM

I've been listening to this track on repeat for the last 15 years straight and I'm still not sick of it.

This track always brings a tear to my eye.
Maybe it is the nostalgia kicking in... memories of a mid-nineties youth with long nights of playing Wipeout with mates, clubbing and one-night stands blooming into doomed relationships. But it was living!

audience video with SBD sound (approved by Karl & the lighting designer), live in Tokyo 2007, featuring a joyous Rick (facebook link, public)

https://i.imgur.com/pbEr2Ci.jpg

Found this cd at a thrift shop for $1.99.. To whoever owned this previously, I want to thank you for letting this go just for me.

-- How've I slept on this stuff until now?!?

- The talent left the group years ago. Unless you were an electronic fan before 2005, there's no reason you would have heard of them except for a couple soundtracks. Pretty sure you're going to be pleased that you found them.

-- I'm a huge Underworld fan - saw them recently, they're as great as ever. It's this Superdeluxe stuff I was unaware of.

- Eh sorry. I heard they split in the mid late 2000s. I haven't been as much of a fan since then. You beat me here, I only found this cause I was having a bad day and wanted to listen to 2nd toughest. I don't even know if they've released anything in the last 10 years. Saw them in 03, is one of my favorite shows ever. Well, have a good day.

:)

jfc djp

now wondering what the top two are, one of them has to be Rez/Cowgirl

gimme five floofs

I love the perfect storm of wrongness from the interlocutor on that last one. Every sentence aggressively incorrect, then a nice polite well-wish to end each post.

http://ghostfood.uk/public/ilx/underworld/u002-947812.png

2. Dirty Epic and Dirty Guitar and Dirty Katamari
2143 combined points, 38 total votes from EVERY VOTER, 5 #1s for Dirty Epic, 1#1 for Dirty
1992 12" by Lemon Interupt
remixed on 1992 white label
rewritten as 1994 Underworld album track

1414 points from 22 votes for Dirty Epic alone: it would have placed at #6

Dirty Epic video by John Warwicker