Freur ‎– Doot-Doot

This album is the debut by the group that wouldn't have great success until 9 years later - then known as Underworld (mk II). This is very hi-tech postpunk and can be seen as laying the groundwork for their later [more boring] techno success story. This music has more melody and hooks but conversely, seems more technologically perverse to me since they had to work -hard- to achieve these effects in 1983-84. John Hudson is credited for "electronic sound processing" and co-production and very few artists were digitally sculpting sound like they were at this time. Around 1983 electropop had begun to really bland out and get MOR. This could never be mistaken for tripe like Naked Eyes!

This is some of the most creative electronic rock music I've heard. It's full of traditional rock values passed through a perverse digital filter. The b-sides are if anything, more beserk and unrestrained. The 2 bonus tracks appended on the US version of this CD are from their more traditional sounding follow-up album. But this album, with Propaganda's "A Secret Wish" represents the peak of electronic rock to me until it all evaporated. Their later phase as the more conventional rock band Underworld [1988-1992] was much less interesting to me and the techno phase [93-current] even moreso. The longer they persevered the less stimulating [yet more successful] their output became.

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For more ruminations on the Fresh New Sound Of Yesterday

Reviewing an album a quarter of a century after its street date is a tricky proposition in some ways, particularly when the band is the product of a very idiosyncratic era, and even more so when they are most commonly thought of as little more than the unintentionally comical footnote to something much greater.

However, having only discovered Freur about three years ago, and after giving them a fair chance, I have to say that I've become oddly hooked. Despite the fact that I'd also dismissed them as little more than a laugh at first, and despite the fact that I'd always intensely disliked this musical "style", even when I was growing up and it was still in vogue, there seemed to be something here that warranted a second listen. Well, that second listen eventually became a third, which became a fourth, and so on, until I was finally able to admit that, despite Freur being very much a product of their time, I actually authentically enjoy listening to them.

I have read other reviews of Freur releases which baldly dismiss the band as being just plain terrible and ultimately noteworthy only for being the proto-form for what would eventually mutate into Underworld/Tomato, and I will repeat that that is unfair. If anything, I think they adequately demonstrated, during their brief tenure in this iteration, that any type of music, no matter how inherently "terrible" it may be, can be done well and made to be interesting. I've listened to the majority of Freur's discography by this point, and I must say that their tracks are surprisingly well arranged and structured, oddly well-produced and mixed for the time, unexpectedly experimental, and intentionally tongue-in-cheek. In fact, I might even go so far as to claim that there's a playful approach to structure and a "to-hell-with-it" attitude towards experimenting that's even lacking in the band's Mk.II and Mk.III incarnations. Not only that, but there's remarkably little filler material on here, as most of the tracks will actually provide a memorable moment or two.

So, to each their own as always. That said, if you can get past the essential (partly intentional?) cheesiness of this whole affair, and listen to it for what it is and nothing more, it might just yield a few pleasant surprises.