One of the hardest things for a concert album to do is capture the experience of actually being there. Sure, you can have the crowd noise, and the inevitable "Thank you, thank you!" from the band, but actually capturing the *energy* of the performance is what a live album should strive for, and this album, like "Frampton Comes Alive", does a surprisingly good job of capturing not just the sound, but the energy of the crowd. When Underworld begins to play "Cowgirl" and the crowd roars its approval, you can feel their excitement, and when the album is finally over, you want to stand up and beg for an encore.

To begin: I have never seen Underworld live. I want to so bad, but the last time they came to Cleveland (if ever...), I had no idea who they were. I am a huge fan, and so this is the closest I'll get (until the DVD comes out in October).

I am in awe. As soon as I got home today, I ran to throw E,E into my CD player. It is probably the best live album I've ever heard. It's very nice how the Undies chop up their songs and turn them into something different. The first three tracks are cut from the same performance, and they don't stop in between. Juanita/Kiteless to Cups is so amazing, and then to Push Upstairs....makes you wanna melt.

After that is a pretty nice version of Pearl's Girl, followed by a pretty good version of Jumbo. The version of Shudder/King of Snake is the only weak link on this disc, as it doesn't sound ALL that different, however it's still very good. After that comes Born Slippy (Nuxx), which totally defied all my expectations. Then the album closes with a wonderful version of Rez/Cowgirl. I can't say enough how great it is.

All in all, if you like Underworld, you must own this disc. It is simply amazing, and it serves as a perfect prerequisite for the DVD.

I recieved an advance copy of this, and I'm listening to it right now as I write this...I'm shaking. This record is simply astounding, and could well become the "Frampton Comes Alive" for our generation. If you're expecting note-by note retreads of Underworld standards, don't buy this. Each song is slowly and beautifully given new life; improvised, from the haunting "Juanita/Kiteless" to the renewed vocals of a battery-charged "Push Upstairs" to the glorious "Born Slippy NUXX." While drum 'n bass is always referred to as the "new jazz," Underworld prove that they can jazz up their techno-house as well as anyone. "Everything, Everything" is like one long extended electronic jam session. This is simply the best live dance album...ever.

A pair of 40-something graphic designers and a slightly younger DJ creating the sound of tomorrow? Yup.

Until the MIDI Circus days of the band's touring with groups like Orbital and the Drum Club, most live techno acts had a tape, a person miming, a dancer, and a singer. They changed all that.

While a bit short, this is a flawless representation of Underworld's live output during 1999. Taken from shows spanning from Glastonbury to Tokyo, the 8 tracks on this record show a band deconstructing their songs and recreating something that's recognizable but far different from the album versions. Witness "Juanita/Kiteless": a minimal groove starts it off, with Karl warbling randomly into a vocoder and the track builds, leading into the second half of "Cups" brilliantly. Mixed as deftly as Sasha or Digweed, this captures those moments that you try to explain to your friends later, and they just don't get it. Every track is perfection: "King Of Snake" and "Born Slippy .nuxx" come across a million times larger and louder than their album counterparts.

Now, for that DVD they've been promising....

This will be difficult to explain. If you've studied chemistry, you know that elements like lithium and sodium are actually metals, even though you don't usually see them in large chunks like gold or iron. Well, this album is like a huge, solid block of Art. Not just good techno, not even neccesarily good _music_, but Art. It's like all music tries to produce a certain sensation, while this is the solid, condensed and packaged version of that sensation. All of the songs are amazing, particularly the 'Juanita' part of Juanita/Kiteless, and the climax of Cups, the best part of the original song. Listening to King of Snake is like participating in some violent pagan ritual. Push Upstairs, a song I always thought was sort of weak, is vastly improved from the album version, and sounds downright unsettling with a section of synthetic heavy breathing sounds. There are freestyle lyrical additions to a lot of songs, to best effect in Push Upstairs and King of Snake, while some of the songs (Jumbo, Born Slippy) are almost completley orthodox. In fact, Jumbo is the only song which I don't think is superior to the studio version; it's about the same, but the original was great. The other weak link is Pearl's Girl, which, although it sounds extremely cool with the looped 'crazycrazycrazycrazy,' never quite reaches the transcendence of the other songs.