Gary Clail - five albums and a 12inch

Funny sometimes, how yesterday's cutting edge can become today's old hat. A case in point being some of Adrian Sherwood's 80s to mid-90s output, namely a large part of the dub and hiphop infused, industrial tinged kind of avant-funk he brewed up with the Tackhead posse. While I think that most of Sherwood's more rootical dub reggae and reggae influenced productions still hold up more than well, a large part of those avant-funk tracks on albums by Tackhead, Mark Stewart or - in this case - Gary Clail sounds a bit dated.

Still, about half the tunes on each Gary Clail album are absolute killers (tellingly, most of them are pretty dubby though), while the rest are at least highly interesting musical time capsules from (post-)Thatcherite Britain, fueled by the undeniable fire of Clail's ranting agit-prop speech-song. And Emotional Hooligan really is a great album, hands down.

Thanks a lot to nad22 for Dreamstealers, Emotional Hooligan and Escape!

Gary Clail's Tackhead Soundsystem - Tackhead Tape Time

Gary Clail & On-U Soundsystem - End Of The Century Party

Gary Clail & On-U Soundsystem - Dreamstealers

Gary Clail & On-U Soundsystem - Emotional Hooligan

Gary Clail & On-U Soundsystem - Escape 12inch

Gary Clail - Keep The Faith

Lee Perry - Excaliburman

(Click on the picture to download.)

Here's another one for today: a short (at 37 minutes), but sweet collection of prime Upsetter goodness from the seventies. Pretty obscure it is too, I'd imagine, at least I've never heard of the Seven Leaves label before or since, and there's hardly any reasonably useful information about this comp on the net. Anyway, here are nine tracks, six by the Upsetters or Lee Perry solo, the others produced by his wackiness at the Black Ark studio. Here's a tracklist and a short comment by Mick Sleeper, the world's foremost authority in Upsetterology. If you like the classic Lee Perry sound (and/or some mighty fine rootical sounds), you're gonna love this one too.

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...

Dub Syndicate - One Way System

(Click on the picture to download.)

Here's a slice of trippy dub psychedelia with sharply accentuated, heavily treated drum sounds, incredibly deep bass lines and keyboards, guitars, sound effects and the occasional vocals hazily sliding in and out of the mix. Released in 1983, this second album by avant dub collective Dub Syndicate still stands as a prime example of early On U-Sound productions and a testament to the genius of both producer Adrian Sherwood and Dub Syndicate's head honcho Style Scott, also drummer for Jamaica's finest session band Roots Radics. And it's also the perfect soundtrack for the glaring sunlight and the dizzying heat weighing down on Vienna at the moment.