All apologies for not posting much the last few weeks, but like many people around the world I caught bad case of Olympic fever. Because we could have the Games on at work I was easily watching on average 12 hours of coverage every day, which didn’t leave a whole lot of time for searching out new music.

For me the musical highlight from those two weeks actually came from the start of Danny Boyle’s Olympic Opening Ceremony. I was extremely excited when I heard months ago that one of my favorite bands of all time, Underworld, was going to do the soundtrack to the Opening Ceremony, and boy, did they not disappoint. The high point of the whole ceremony came towards the very beginning of the show with the transition from the pastoral English countryside to the industrialized England that helped bring the world into the modern era, culminating in the forging of a giant ring that was raised above the stadium to join four others and create the Olympic rings. The spectacle of that was impressive enough in its own right, but it was taken to extreme levels of jaw-dropping amazingness by Underworld’s epic 15 minute long song “And I Will Kiss”. This is probably my favorite thing Underworld has done in at least a decade and, for me at least, this sequence triumphed over anything we saw in Beijing’s much talked about Opening Ceremony. Stunning, just stunning.

It’s hard to get any great footage of the entire sequence because NBC sucks and the Olympic Committee are Nazis when it comes to unauthorized use of their broadcasts, but here is a pretty decent five minute clip of the rings being raised, shot by someone sitting in the stadium.

And here’s the whole song with some decent photos from the whole sequence for those who want to hear the whole glorious thing start to finish.