Music

From Dub Syndicate Don, Another Brick in Diwali

Adrian Sherwood
Never Trust a Hippy
Realworld

The seemingly proto-industrial knocking giving away to breakdance-on-the-moon green-cheese electrobeats in the spare cut featuring the eternally dubbing Muswell Hillbilly's teenage daughter (not to mention words about exhausting physical resources as even small nations build up atomic arms) comes from Diwali doctor Lenky, whose blips likewise poke out of the airily ax-percussed "Hari Up Hari." Sly and Robbie assist on a cricket-noise-haunted field-holler blues and a seesawing chamber-bop thing. "Majestic 12" has space-cowboy yodels, "No Dog Jazz" has a barefoot nyabinghi chant going "I saw mari-jua-no," "Dead Man Smoking" has jazzy dogs, "X-Planation" gets rubbery in the bush of ghosts, the qawwali remix booms for eight minutes, the most collaged track is also the most metaled and most rapped. Adrian's been doing this for decades now. This is his first solo album.

Death Comet Crew
DCC America
Troubleman Unlimited

The Ram-ram-ram-the-el-el-el-the-zee-zee-zee has been doing his mock-messianic space-samurai triple-dutch hog-Latin for decades, and he still doesn't have a solo album. The first one by his first galaxy-scratching noise-dub-metal hip-hop collective is due out soon, though. In 1985, Beggars Banquet U.K. put out a four-cut EP that rocked so much and shocked so well like an iconoclast and a finger to the stick, especially in the "thousand mile wolf dwarf star hymn to him" called "At the Marble Bar" and the even tougher "Exterior Street," which provides music for two dub versions on DCC's followup EP 18 years later. The first one has the record's only actual rapping; the second has welding-tool noises perhaps inspired at a Ritz double bill with Test Dept. There's also "my country 'tis of thee" chopped up à la the first Was (Not Was) LP but with Trouble Funk scratches, and a bigass distorted traffic jam featuring sex during a war. Cool. So when's the Gettovetts reunion?

Lookin' at The Devil, Grinnin' at His Gun

David Banner
Mississippi: The Screwed & Chopped Album
Universal

Standing at the crossroads, believe I'm sinking down: toward the paranoid dub blues of "Time Has Come Today," "Mind Playing Tricks on Me," Lee Perry's Time Boom and de Devil Dead, Bam Bam's 1987 Chicago house nightmare "Where's Your Child?" And, most of all, Sly's "Thank You For Talkin' to Me Africa," spiritual template for the codeined doomification of all Houston screwing and chopping. But from Allmans twangs to chitlin circuit wails to Banner's own dirt-road growl, Michael Watts's syrup here is as much log cabin as cough. Five cuts in, the "thug-assed nigga with bad table manners" moans "fast life, a nigga needs to slow me down," and from there on the music grows as midnight-green and night-vision-goggled as the CD cover looks. 2003's most morose record exposes braggadocio as stoned delusion and insecurity—sort of like Black Sabbath in 1970, maybe. And if Thom Yorke wonders what a Dixieland funeral-wake 20,000 leagues under the Delta really sounds like, he should check out "Fuck 'Em."