There have been times that I’ve wished this tumblr was One Week One Album, and this is one of them. I could easily write a small book on Second Toughest in the Infants, one of my favourite records of all time, the title of which “derives from a comment made by member Rick Smith’s six-year-old nephew, Simon Prosser, when asked on his progress at Infant School, the level of schooling attended by four- to seven-year-old children in the United Kingdom” (thank you, Wikipedia).

Yes, as you can tell by the week so far I’m a strong supporter of Underworld’s other work, and it’s not that I think the first two records are ‘better’; honestly, except for Beaucoup Fish, the comparison is pretty apples vs. oranges to me. There are times that I’m more in the mood to hear Oblivion With Bells than this record. I understand that Hyde, in particular, wasn’t in a great place when he wrote these lyrics, so I imagine hearing people praising those first two records above what came later, when he was healthier, that can’t feel good. And I strongly, instinctively react negatively to claims that a band did their only good or great work in their first few albums (most long-running bands that I love disprove that contention easily).

But if I was pressed to try and figure out which album is the definitive Underworld statement, well…

I don’t remember buying Second Toughest in the Infants, but if “Two Months Off”/A Hundred Days Off marked the beginning of my real love for the band, having my life swallowed whole by this record marks the point where I noticed just how much I loved them. I know I bought it used, from work, but I don’t recall ever listening to it in the store. I’m pretty sure at the time I had some knee-jerk/contrarian feelings about the first two albums, down to growing up with Beaucoup Fish, loving A Hundred Days Off, and getting sick and tired of reading people trashing the later stuff in favour of this first two. I don’t think I ever claimed that they were bad, just overrated. So naturally when I finally gave the album a good listen I fell for it swiftly and severely.

The first couple of listens, I needed to use the tracks I already knew from Everything, Everything to orient myself (this is, as previously mentioned, a very long album). After I noticed the difference between “Juanita/Kiteless” there and “Juanita/Kiteless/To Dream of Love” here (the subtraction of the “you should have walked away” part as much as the addition to “To Dream of Love”) I found myself, and still sometimes find myself, wishing that Hyde would erupt at the end of “Kiteless.” But having him plaintitively sing the “there is a sound on the other side of this wall” part of the song without ever letting him get forceful, and in fact taking the track in an even more downbeat direction with the colorful (ha ha) dialogue of “To Dream of Love” gives the track(s?) a wistfulness that’s neither present nor appropriate on the live album.

And really, this is still one of the best compositions of Underworld’s career, sweeping in its sonic and emotional scope and pulling off a multi-part composition far more gracefully than 99% of prog-rock bands could manage. When Hyde returns again and again to the image of “your thin, your thin paper wings” it’s both melodically compelling and inscrutably moving. Those echoing guitar notes are interesting too, if only to remind us that when Emerson joined the band he was the one who insisted that Hyde not jettison the instrument entirely. Although Second Toughest is as techno as all get out, there are ways in which I’m tempted to call it the best art-rock album of 1996, and not just because they kept that guitar. It’s the way that a track like this one is more epic in whatever way you’d care to name than the highlights of most ponderous concept albums, for one thing (and thanks to that motorik underpinning, it moves too much to get bogged down the way most 70+ minute albums do).

If “Juanita/Kiteless/To Dream of Love” was a beautiful opening salvo to my experience of “classic” Underworld, “Banstyle/Sappys Curry” was where it really gelled for me that we have something special on our hands. Now, I love the sprawl of Second Toughest, but can you imagine if for the follow-up to dubnobass or even in an alternate reality where Underworld were putting out records in the late 70s or something if they’d released an album (vinyl, of course) that was just side A: “Juanita/Kiteless/To Dream of Love” side B: “Banstyle/Sappys Curry”? In some ways I feel like that would be even more seismic. I love short, sharp statements, and I love concise albums. Now, that’s under 32 minutes from a 73 minute album that I think is basically flawless, so I’m not arguing it should have actually happened, but something about the notion gives me the chills, in a good way.

The track itself is much more laid back than its predecessor, especially in the vocals, and the divide between the two parts is maybe even more pronounced than before (just look at the lyrics). While I love the first part (something about it just seems unutterably stylish and classy to me), is the second bit where my heart really is. An endlessly compelling guitar loop starts up, the beat turns shuddery, and Hyde softly intones “I think I found the real stuff” to himself. The track almost seems to be shivering itself to pieces near the end, and it does feel like an end. There’s plenty of variation on dubnobass (and we’ll get there), but if anyone was wondering if Underworld could add any new speeds to their arsenal, this should have answered them definitively.

After those two heady, lengthy tracks, a listener could be forgiven for wanting a bit of a breather, but “Confusion the Waitress,” a fine song in its own right, only brings some tension into the proceedings. It’s probably a good insight into Karl Hyde’s self-awareness about his alcoholism; among the things that “she said,” we have:

you can do anything you want

you can be with anyone

you can go anywhere you want

you can say anything you need

you can be anywhere you feel

just pick up the phone

don’t go dark on me again

The track is certainly foreboding; a steady pound, a keyboard part that actually sounds like someone saying “uh ohhhhh,” a mockingly digitized Hyde (and, really, for all that his lyrics sometimes feel like pure id, how perfect is his name) croaking out the title, and the normal Hyde almost getting echoed out of existence at one point. Dark and sleek, “Confusion the Waitress” is less dramatic than the next few tracks, but I get that almost recriminatory “she said” section stuck in my head a lot.

“Rowla,” the final, focused version of b-side “Cherry Pie,” is the (much) more significant of the album’s two instrumentals. In fact, it might be my favourite Underworld instrumental. But then again I’m a sucker for the kind of wobbly, head-spinning tone that dominates the bulk of the track. If I’d had this track in high school I could have put it on a mix with “Moaner,” Daft Punk’s “Rollin’ & Scratchin’” and “Rock'n'Roll,” Laurent Garnier’s “The Sound of the Big Babou,” Magnetophone’s “Air Methods,” and μ-Ziq’s “The Motorbike Track” and “Burst Your Arm” for full effect. Pete and I would have played the hell out of that mix, I can assure you.

But as great as “Rowla” assuredly is, in some ways it’s just a prelude. I feel strong enough about “Pearls Girl” that I thought about giving it is own entry; if I were writing a book, it’d get its own chapter. I could fall into just giving you an extremely close reading of what happens here (I’ll try not to). So why not its own piece? Well, despite it being the other track that I heard before getting Second Toughest, it just feels like an inextricable part of the album. The way that “Rowla” squelches to a halt so that the watery opening to “Pearls Girl” can melt in, the telephone-squished vocal sample, and then my personal favourite use of the Amen break… while I have a personal fondness for “Jumbo” and “Two Months Off” that mean I’ve played them more often than this track, it’s probably Underworld’s best song (whatever that could mean). It’s definitely the one I would play you first if you’d never heard them before; before “Jumbo,” before “Born Slippy.” There was even a promo video, although you can probably guess whether I think you need to hear the full nine-and-a-half minutes.

Hell, I can get excited about it just by seeing the words “Korea Korea re-Reverend Al Green, deep blue Morocco, the water on stone, the water on concrete, the water on sand, the water on fire, smoke the wind the salt the bright coming days in the water…” (I should stop; and I know the opening is probably “rioja rioja” instead, but I hear “Korea” every time). The whole thing is just flawless; the production, maybe their most cinematic and propulsive, Hyde’s vocals magisterial and full of hidden knowledge (the damn thing practically plays out like a Grant Morrison Batman comic; “Morocco Hamburg Paris the pieces of the puzzle are waiting…”). As Luca Turin said about perfume, the loveliness of the track turns my critical machinery into whirring junk. Maybe even more than “Jumbo” it’s the song that makes me want to get evangelical about this band; it’s just perfect.

After “Pearls Girl,” anything would be an anticlimax, and it’s not surprising that “Air Towel” is the song on Second Toughest that I remember the least. But that doesn’t mean that it’s bad; quite frankly, the end of “Pearls Girl” doesn’t sound like the end of an album, so you had to put something there, and listening to it always gives me one of those “oh, this one, I like this one” moments. It’s a little more anonymous than the strongest moments here, Hyde’s vocals almost subsumed entirely into the digital burble of the music, but it can still get your head bobbing.

The real interlude is “Blueski,” which in my head is pronounced “blue sky,” not “blue skee.” Just under three minutes of looped, intersecting guitar parts. Not much happens, but it’s spikily interesting, and it leads into the much stronger finale, “Stagger.”

I’m just going to turn things over to Rick Smith for a minute here:

Creatively, Karl is a loose cannon. I still can’t second-guess what he’ll want to express or why. It does irritate me when people talk about Karl writing stream-of-consciousness lyrics as if it’s cheap. Whether you spend 24 hours working on something or two minutes, it’s irrelevant. There was this piece that we did called “Stagger”: I remember vividly I was pissed off at the time and just didn’t want to work, but Karl was like “Come on, why don’t we plug in the keyboard and you play, and I’ll sing.” I think we did it in one take – it took all of 10 minutes – and it’s one of my favourite things we’ve ever done.

The measured, contemplative “Stagger” doesn’t sound to me like anything improvised in ten minutes, but that’s part of Smith’s point, I think. It’s certainly one of Hyde’s richest vocal performances, from the way he works “straighten”/“straight in” over the course of the track to his delivery of “make up for all their messes, I could listen to you all day, what a laugh, cut me I bleed like you, HA HA” (one of my favourite vocal moments on any Underworld song), and the warm, tumbling tones of the production are gorgeous. As I’ve mentioned, closers on Underworld albums are often less dramatic, and this one is a great example.

Ordinarily with an album I love as much as I love Second Toughest in the Infants, I’d try to sum up things here, but I’ve only scratched the surface. Befitting such a lengthy album, it contains multitudes, and as the closing guitar squiggle and far off beat detonations of “Stagger” slowly fade, I’m mostly seized by the desire to unpack it all, all over again.

If I had to pick just three tracks from this album to give a neophyte a good first impression, I’d go with: “Juanita/Kiteless/To Dream of Love,” “Pearls Girl,” “Stagger”