Album Review: Teatime Dub Encounters [EP] by Underworld & Iggy Pop

"Batshit brilliance from three mad scientists with so much still to prove" Having both been so integral to the soundtrack and spirit of the original Trainspotting movie, ‘Teatime Dub Encounters’ was borne of an attempted collaboration between Underworld and Iggy Pop to create something special for the sequel T2. For their first meeting, a studio was set up in a hotel room at The Savoy in London and a natural chemistry drove everything from there. It may not have made it for T2, but a beautiful beast of its own came into being.

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The pairing of Underworld with Iggy Pop, two masterful frontmen plus inventive and limitless musical accompaniment equals exponential charisma overload. Teatime Dub Encounters is this collaboration's four-song EP, whose title implies it would be a low-key affair. It is anything but. This partnership is not as farfetched as it may seem, especially considering Pop's "Lust for Life" and Underworld's "Born Slippy (Nuxx)" sat side-by-side on Trainspotting's soundtrack some 20 years ago as the most natural of combinations.

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Iggy Pop and Underworld were unwittingly and unforgettably linked in 1996, when "Lust for Life" and "Born Slippy (NUXX)," songs they'd released 18 years apart, were used as the opening and closing tracks in Danny Boyle's film adaptation of Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting. Twenty years later, the musicians converged again. Iggy's Post Pop Depression and Underworld's Barbara Barbara were coincidentally released the same day, and shortly thereafter, the artists met to work on music for T2 Trainspotting.

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Iggy's got a few complaints: The world's changing, nothing's fun anymore, he hardly has any friends and the ones he does have are a pain, the music industry is a drag, his reputation isn't what it used to be. Oh, and you can't smoke on flights. On an EP filled with these kinds of lamentations, one couplet neatly epitomizes his gripe: "It's getting harder to be free/It's getting so much harder to be me." The first line might be on the money, but the second reduces his message to one of solipsistic whining.

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