Various Artists - King Size Dub Vol. 1

Disc 1 Disc 2

The first - and by far the best - installment of the long-running King Size Dub series is dedicated to British and British/Jamaican productions. At 27 tracks on two discs, it's quite a varied collection of amazingly high quality. Actually the only dull moments are two rather clumsy attempts at a fusion of dub and house by Got To Move and Zion Train. Highlights include tracks by the On-U posse (two each by Dub Syndicate and Revolutionary Dub Warriors and three Bim Sherman collaborations), Iration Steppas and The Disciples. I've hardly been keeping up with UK dub for almost ten years now, but I'm told that these tracks from the early and mid nineties catch the scene at its last creative peak. Could be true, given that most of the handful of newer tracks I've heard were quite by-the-numbers.

Listening to those two discs for the first time in years, what struck me was how dark, claustrophobic, cold and sometimes almost brutal a lot of it sounds in comparison to classic Jamaican dub. Often cluttered with eerie sound effects, the sonic space is incredibly dense and - especially on the steppers style tunes with their typical relentless four-to-the-floor drums - the beats and bass lines often come down with a brute, forceful ultra-heaviness. (Btw, these are all compliments in my book.) At times there's also a kind of haunted sadness contrasting quite effectively with the powerful rhythms. There's a unique quality to this sound that you don't even get from the bleakest and most militant Keith Hudson tracks or Lee Perry at his craziest and most paranoid. Actually, I'd say that a close comparison would be the best of current dubstep productions (i.e. the stuff that doesn't just sound like drum'n'bass played at the wrong speed).

Of course the use of digital equipment partly explains the difference between Jamaican and UK productions. But maybe the bleak vibe of UK dub owes as much to the fact that the tunes were recorded and/or mixed in the monochrome grey of English cities. To my ears this music sounds very urbane and even borderline-dystopian at times. Its eerieness and slightly creepy sense of alienation reminds me more of a band like Joy Division than any Jamaican dub. I don't know too much about the UK dub scene, but I think that maybe this similiarity in feel to a certain strain of post-punk has more to do with a specific sense of place rather than just some personal ties to punk and post-punk (Adrian Sherwood and some of the On-U Sound posse, Small Axe who evolved out of sub-Clash band The Ruts...). Dread music straight outta the grey heart of Babylon...