Tag Archives: dub

inthemix.com.au, Review, Writing

Fat Freddy’s Drop – Dr Boondigga and the Big BW

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Fat Freddy’s Drop can easily be described in one word – smooth. Everything about this album is smooth, relaxed, and wonderful. They one of those bands who you can listen to again and again and always find something new in their music. The first listen you might be taken into by the groove, the second you might get simply enchanted with Dallas Tamaira’s voice and on subsequent listens you might get a deeper understanding of the lyrics.

The album begins with the Big BW, a laid back mellow tune that rolls along smoothly, reminding me a little of Sade’s No Ordinary Love. Something I really love about this album is the way different genres can be encased in the one track, which is showcased on Shiverman. An excellent dubby house like tune which uses reverb and echo on Dallas’ voice to build the vibe up and up, and then breaks down into a horn filled funk out. The Camel is a slow groove track featuring the wonderful Alice Russell, with one of the funkiest keyboard endings for two decades.

The Nod is aptly named, because this is what you must do to the funky soul. The great thing about this tune is mid track it breaks out into an almost ragtime jazz time signature! It’s completely unexpected and utterly fantastic. The Raft is very much a dub reggae tune, with lyrics such as “although we may not be many my people are ready for the storm to come” and the reggae horn stabs accentuating every beat.

All the tunes on the album are awesome, and although this is their second album they’ve bypassed the sophomore slump, delivering a smooth and pleasurable listening experience that’s sure to please existing fans and gain them a whole lot more.

inthemix.com.au, Music, Review, Writing

DubXanne – The Police in Dub

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The Police are, without a doubt, one of the most influential rock bands of the 20th Century, selling over 50 million albums worldwide, and, along with the Clash helped introduce the sounds of Jamaican dub reggae to a wider audience by adopting the riddims and pacing into their own works. So it seems fitting that 30 years after they formed, DubXanne takes their tunes and rework them into a dub reggae sound for a new generation.

Of course, this has been done before – The Easy Star Allstar’s Dub Side of the Moon and Radiodread gave Pink Floyd and Radiohead respectively the dub treatment, and I suspect that some of the Easy Star Allstars had their hand in this record too, although the exact line up of DubXanne is a mystery. Like those other two releases, there are some outstanding reworks, and a couple which miss the target. And, maybe it’s because the dub structure is already there in the original material, or maybe it because I prefer the Police as a band, I’m yet to determine, but out of the three I think DubXanne works the best.

Walking on the Dub (Walking on the Moon) kicks the album off and the etherealness of the original is retained and amplified to create a much more psychedelic experience. Dubxanne (Roxanne) features Eased from Berlin outfit Seeed, and his deep voice provides a really great antithesis to the original Sting whine. Whenever I listened to Message in a Bottle I used to think of a cold, bleak English Coast island, but Message in a Dub featuring Earl 16 brings a warmer, West Indies feel to the song. Spirits in a Dubworld (Spirits in a Material World) has given greater meaning thanks to Benjamin Zaphaniah’s new lyrics.

Being dub, many tracks have the lyrics totally stripped, with only a few phrases being sung and echoed instead of the entire song sung. It is here where the misses strike. Driven to Dub (Driven to Tears) and Dub on the Night (Bring on the Night) both seem a little bit “K-Tel”, but this is only because of the brilliance of the other instrumentals like Regatta De Dub (Regatta De Blanc) and Can’t Stand Losing Dub (Can’t Stand Losing You).

Overall, despite the misses, this album is brilliant. This could have been a quick and nasty knock off, produced to cash in on the Police’s reformation, but the effort that DubXanne have gone into to make the tracks into dub masterpieces, as well as the obvious love of the original material, makes this album truly great.