Teatime Dub Encounters [EP]

This unlikely four-track collaboration finds Smith’s daughter Esme providing sublime backing vocals and channels Pop’s formidable wordsmith talents into spontaneous, narrative freestyles.

Teatime Dub Encounters doesn’t pale in their shadow or smack of a vanity or side project. This is a whole new monster born of the friction from a restless need to create, the pure abandon to do whatever the fuck feels good, and the batshit brilliance from three mad scientists with so much still to prove. Others of their standing may choose the wallowing legacy of safety. These guys do not.

All of this was put together in a few casual hotel room recording sessions. It takes OGs like Underworld and Pop to remind both their peers and their successors how it is done.

So you might come to Teatime Dub Encounters--a most English half-smile of titles, one that echoes the rueful cosiness of another Underworld opus, Second Toughest in the Infants--for the antic misdemeanours, or for the latterday Dylanish radio drawl, but you will stay for the way Iggy confesses that he has always struggled to make friends and keep the ones he’s got--the gist of I’ll See Big.

A diverting if inconsequential EP filled with a lot of flippant humor and a little serious reflection.

Underworld’s compositions are lush and polished, while Iggy’s ad-libs tend to spin their wheels, at times pausing and sputtering while he searches for the next word or phrase.