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Underworld: Strawberry Hotel review – sweet bangers and sad laments
The techno giants’ 11th album finds them ranging from cut-up dancefloor fillers to gentle experimentation
Of course, Strawberry Hotel defies easy definition, veering from Born Slippy-indebted bangers to a simple closing guitar track via Ottavia – opera singer (and daughter of Rick Smith) Esme Bronwen-Smith ’s delivery of a lament by Nero’s wife, set to a percolating electronic indictment. Tracks such as Techno Shinkansen(gleaming disco house, Giorgio Moroder bassline) and Sweet Lands Experience (“I was more smashed than you were,” notes Karl Hyde over more primo Smith audio tweakery) confirm the dancefloor remains in Underworld’s forebrain, 30 years since their breakthrough with genre-straddling third album Dubnobasswithmyheadman(1994). The excellent, three-legged Doppler synths on Burst of Laughter find Hyde singing warmly to the lonely and broken, echoing the gentle succour of this album’s defining psych-pastoral opener, Black Poppies – a powerful hymn to embracing change.
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