Underworld's "Juanita" on Everything, Everything

is everyone rediscovering Underworld all of a sudden? I was listening to my Dirty Epic/Cowgirl single last night. top stuff.

these are my intentions.

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B00004YZGT.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

look for bootleg babies... at like www.rtsr.org i believe.

its like a best of live, all mixed together by some crazy fans... its excellent

Last time I posted on here someone accused me of being a street team and then ended up looking silly. I wonder if that will happen again?

Do whatever you have to to get a copy, it's just amazingly emotional music.

it's enough to make you want all dance music to have vocals and lyrics, if they could all be as good as Underworld's.

I think I heard a couple of new tracks in there. (that one around 13:00 - anyone know it?)

Great listen, anyway. Starts off with a 5-minute interview w/Karl.

So, any info on the new album?

I am going to see them at benicassim.
Will check the new tracks first... Exciting...

:-(

I also been listening to dubnobass... a lot and it's really not a surprise that the only song there I dislike is the one that sounds the most like a Second Toughest... track in terms of structure and development ("Spoonman"; for fuck's sake DO SOMETHING WITH THE BEAT).

Yes the opener to this album is amazing. Actually the whole thing is. I love this album so much.

relapse. so so good. best "album dance act" ever, by miles and miles. "everything, everything" just stands so tall.

"I acquired "Second Toughest..." whilst driving from NYC to Chicago, and listened to it while blazing past Gary IN steel mills and while driving through Chicago at night. I thought it was the best album I'd ever heard!"

So yes, responding to a nine year old post - but Second Toughest really is the greatest travelling music. Even better for trains than Kraftwerk. I remember Second Toughest used to go so, so well with my high speed train journeys through industrial Yorkshire, into the countryside and down into the low, flat terrain of Merseyside. Especially at night. A magical record.

I've er, never heard Everything, Everything. Listening to it now for the first time.

One of the things that I think is really remarkable about Everything, Everything is the way the modifications to the tunes work so well - e.g. the new keyboard pattern throughout "Juanita", the additional sections of "Push Upstairs" and "King of Snake".

This is a product of both circumstance and skill. Underworld are unusual, I think, in that (Hyde's vocals aside) even their big anthems tended toward the tracky and stretched out, which conversely means that they're some of the most well-known, recognisable techno tracks around. So these adjustments and additions are way more noticeable and startling than they would be in a dance artist live set comprising renditions of equally great but less well known material.

Yet at the same time you'd think there'd be this risk that messing with the proven formula would make these versions lesser than the original, but they never do (give or take whether you think "Cups" requires its deep house section) - instead they retain everything great in the originals while building on them, offering a wider lens, covering more ground while never losing focus.

^^^^

that nails what I really love about this album. When it comes to building up a big techno epic, UW are second to none. The way Juanita builds up on Second Toughest is excellent, almost a clinic in how it's done, but the EE version is all for the benefit of the listener, every single section in its right place, and the guitar chords come in at the perfect time. I used to bring this album to parties and it always had this great communal vibe to it; the audience is really a part of the whole thing, and every time they erupt, it feels like you should too. "Cups" is more of a segway; outside of that I do agree that everything is expanded on and just feels natural. If I had started this thread I'd make it about "Rez/Cowgirl" which always gives me chills. This has got to be electronic's finest live album, IMO it's the best live album of any genre.

This thread where Tuomas refuses to countenance the possibility of a techno live album being better than the original material is pretty funny.

the modifications to the tunes work so well

see also the preset (i say that because it sounds just like the choir voice and swoosh on GC's '14:31') they attached to Pearl's Girl towards the end just to give it that extra element of transcension. i saw them twice not long before the release of EE but don't remember ever hearing that :(

So yes, responding to a nine year old post - but Second Toughest really is the greatest travelling music. Even better for trains than Kraftwerk. I remember Second Toughest used to go so, so well with my high speed train journeys through industrial Yorkshire, into the countryside and down into the low, flat terrain of Merseyside. Especially at night. A magical record.

I've er, never heard Everything, Everything. Listening to it now for the first time.

Second Toughest was always my go-to album for long car journeys when I was younger, such a great record. I've never heard E,E either - I'm not a huge live album fan in general - but this thread makes me want to give it a go.

"Juanita" is definitely their finest moment.

(Album version, not the Everything, Everything version.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6pouE8YmoQ

Finding his accent (on the live version) v v strange and disconcerting. A bit American, a bit Manc even, but mostly oo-ar I am a zider-drinking farmer from zumerzet.

this thread seems like a good place to put the breathless emailed promo copy for "Juanita 2022"
--


*Introducing the JUANITA collection*

*Limited 12'' heavy-weight vinyl* Limited Apparel* Signed Lithograph* LIMITED QUANTITIES AVAILABLE 

...................................................................................................................

Vinyl & Digital Track Listing:
1. / A: Juanita 2022
2. / AA: Juanita (Everything, Everything - Live Version)

Some music is just eternal. It is unshakable and divine, as if it’s been written on hidden chords or carved from a different rock to everything else. Maybe it’s not in your ears or on your mind all the time - imagine a much-loved old friend whose number has slipped off speed dial - but it’s part of your personal algorithm, swirled in your blood, coiled ready to send an electric prickle up the back of the neck once its story unfolds over you again.

Juanita is one of those tracks. Progressive in the very best way (in that it moves things forward) Juanita is solid proof that music shouldn’t need to be boring or formulaic. Music could all be like this. Just press play again and welcome the drift.

Named after much-loved Tomato mainstay and voice of Two Months Off Juanita Boxill, the track was the opener that Second Toughest In The Infants needed. As the way into Underworld’s second album, it had a mighty point to prove. Dubnobasswithmyheadman had effortlessly fused disparate musical worlds together into one unique whole. The band’s second album had to go deeper and turn curiosity into fixation. And Juanita (or, Juanita: Kiteless: To Dream Of Love to give the triptych its full title) was custom built to do just that.

The original was a sixteen and a half minute mind bend in real time; a plunge point to take you deep inside the machine, Juanita takes the same journey each time it’s played… and yet… each time, the focus seems to change, leading you down on a different route. Pounding metronomic techno and robot beat poetry gives way to a shower of piano notes that cascade around you before a Reichian ambience melts everything into white and green and red and red and black and red and white and grey and silver and green and grey and black. Listen again and it might be driven by a snarling guitar, a reversed rhythm and a disconnected elegy.

This drop offers two new versions of Juanita on one piece of vinyl.

The first is an evolution. A twelve minute-plus contemporary collage, it turns the whole thing on its head by taking pieces from Juanita past and present to create a series of new routes through the heart of the track. It adds both new vocals and parts recorded at the time but unused until now along with recordings of the track’s eponymous muse used as part of Underworld live shows in the ’90s. Further proof that music is never finished, this is Juanita eternal as ever, ready for her shining future.

The second version is the Everything, Everything live recording pressed onto vinyl for the first time - a snapshot of Underworld on the massive 1999 Beaucoup Fish world tour that saw them headline Fuji Rock and grace the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury.

The artwork for this limited release has been created by Simon Taylor/Tomato and features Juanita herself.

some kind of live version hybrid, this new one (Karl vocals from a show? partially?). Now playing the "European Club Gig" bootleg version that leads off this fan made compilation... i dunno because i can't believe they are hyping two versions of this that are "only" 12 minutes long

In for the drop. A sweater with the setlist of a gig i was at 17 years ago? oh yes please.

and a second vinyl so that i might one day recoup the shipping. bloody.....

wish they'd just press Everything, Everything, it's such an immortal live album and I think it would work really well on vinyl

still mystified but i feel i will reach the acceptance stage over the weekend :)

it's sort of the opposite of the Cowgirl drop (the only other one i went for), not luxuriating in the elements of the song (the Munich version is something like this), but making a little tighter, bouncier, meatier version. I'm not sure it's so different from the EE version.. but I'll play em some more soon

Flipping through EE just now, you actually could do a double vinyl no problem that wouldn't mess with any transitions (there are less of them than i would've figured).. but cmon. The way to take that in is the ludicrous multi-video "angle" DVD. What a piece of work.

It's pretty funny how the market has evolved to dribbling things out on vinyl compared to the turn of the century multimedia sort of exteavaganza.... i think underworldlive.com was started about then to continue the sort of experience (and in the DVD we'll put a weblink you can click on your computer!)

Munich as in "European club gig" i linked

I get it now. I listened to nothing but versions of this song on a 25km bike trail run and I'm on board. The new version is the best. It uses the live version elements but doesn't get too nutty with it (on the fan board there's criticism the "HUNH!" at the end of the "when you walked away" bit is a little muted... but my goodness save a little embellishment for the crowds). I've always liked their use of Juanita's voice and adding it in here helps to keep it a little grounded. It is all a lot packed into 12 minutes. The odd use of actual crowd noise blending into synths is cute.

what the heck let's have an embed

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTM15wqVDFE

was kinda assuming this wouldn't have the, uh, toughness that I love about the original, and I was right. might get over it though.

The original's vocal production on the first part? The sparse section at around 9min?

Yeah pretty much Rick hashing out the live version to record.

vocal production on the first part yeah

also the relentless build - the way the beat gets harder around 2:20, then does it again, vocal hook comes into to reinforce that, basically nothing comes in to to relieve tension until the guitar around 4:09

played the EE version of this today which I have not heard in a while. I used to bike around the city and listen to this CD all the time as a teenager & imagine myself in the crowd. the two happiest moments in my life might've been 1) the bass drop and 2) the guitar clanging for the first time

bud we should bike

This is very similar to the EE “Juanita” but nevertheless and predictably the little adjustments and reorderings are a delight. The way that the piano vamp from the Everything Everything version emerges at about 2:30 is, well, everything

I'm forever the opposite of DJP on this track, but I'll give the 2022 version a listen. Maybe it finds a happy medium.

I don’t really understand the concept of liking one and not the other, in either direction.

That said, if anything the new version leans harder into the changes that the EE version made: de-trackifying it and turning it into a succession of fast-paced transitions between motifs like a delirious hall of mirrors. So you probably won’t like it?

Yeah, I don't love this.

This...

the way the beat gets harder around 2:20, then does it again, vocal hook comes into to reinforce that, basically nothing comes in to to relieve tension until the guitar around 4:09

is a big part of why I love the album version. It's so "I Feel Love" monolithic and all the more effective for the subtlety it makes in its changes.

The greatest album of all time

This renewed realisation brought you by the long transition from “Cups” into “Push Upstairs”, which is like the camera slowly panning away from the above ground city in Metropolis into a cross-section revealing the dystopian worker’s city below ground.

Something about the tempo in this album is really specific, obviously I guess it's not just about whatever bpm it is, but it has this kind of urgency about it that's hard to pin down, like it's a kind of overall feeling. That transition is definitely evocative of that, like a tiny pause as one track becomes the next, then immediately back into that really driving, particular tempo.

It seems sort of easy and effortless but not when you consider a lot of live sets are sort of just loop a beat and then move into another track. I guess there aren't many of the big stadium dance acts who have that more tracky uniformity to their music, it more often is a barrier to ever becoming one of those bands.