Elmer Fudd–like voice in buzzing electric guitars and shiny keyboards. Often brilliant, occasionally creepy songs such as the bitter toe-tapper “Without You” and the optimistic six-minute epic “Light of Day” aren’t appreciably improved by the trappings, but still cut deeply. JON YOUNG

 

Kings of Convenience Declaration of Dependence

••••••••••

Acoustic twosome strum and pluck away the pain Five years have passed since we last heard from

Norwegian shrinking violets Erlend Øye and Eirik Glambek Bøe. They’re still extremely sad, but now they’re showing it in different ways. In addition to well-turned folk melodies and sparkling finger-picking (check “ 24-25”), the duo now drape their sparse melancholy in gentle Brazilian rhythms (“Me in You”) and Gypsy jazz (“Boat Behind”). At times, the forlorn vibe can get oppressive—“Peacetime Resistance” goes one love-as-war metaphor too far—but overall, the album is a welcome return from these princes of the bummer. DAVID MARCHESE

Kiss Sonic Boom

••••••••••

Rock elders in best-LP-since-Love Gun shocker! In the 11 years since releasing the patchy Psycho Circus, Kiss have marketed kaskets, opened a koffeeshop, and released krappy solo albums, apparently on a mission to make everyone but diehards forget that, for a few LPs running, they were the greatest rock band of the ’70s. It’s a breath of fiery air, then, that their latest is as close to a return to classic form as anyone could reasonably expect. “Never Enough” and “Stand,” in particular, equal the anthemic might of “Rock and

Roll All Nite,” while “Danger Us” actually transcends its silly titular pun. The clichés (sorry, lyrics) otherwise define hoary, as backbones slip, things go out of the frying pan and into the fire, and hearts beat like drums. Nice to hear some things never change. DOUG BROD

 

Lightning Bolt Earthly Delights

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Punk two-piece hitch a ride outta Rhode Island These Providence noise-scene kings’ fifth album comes by its title honestly: Earthly Delights plays like an epic couch-surf around the globe, with scratchy African

guitars (“Flooded Chamber”), scuzzy Southern-boogie riffs (“Funny Farm”), and a springy dream-pop melody straight out of the Kiwi-rock handbook (“Rain on Lake I’m Swimming In”). Their unholy fuzz feels less triumphant, and the Helmet impression in opener “Sound Guardians” is some kind of weird. Still, Lightning Bolt’s basement has never sounded bigger. MIKAEL WOOD

Massive Attack Splitting the Atom

••••••••••
Cinematic soul seekers
scout nightmare’s edge
Suggesting enormous

dread through anxious details, this four-track preview of the Bristol trip-hop collective’s long-awaited 2010 album slithers like a delicate monster. “Splitting the Atom” is a high-resolu-tion snapshot of economic collapse, while “Pray for Rain” features TV on the Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe crooning over ominous piano and drums, then harmonizing with himself in a fleeting patch of sunshine. Sinister remixes of cuts fronted by Martina Topley-Bird and Elbow’s Guy Garvey reconnect Massive to their stylistic descendants, while further refining their calm on the verge of chaos. BARRY WALTERS

Toward the end of the 1960s, a few Jamaican reggae producers happened upon what later became known as dub by taking acetates of existing 45s, submerging the vocals and other lead instruments, foregrounding the rhythm, then echoing it all into oblivion. Worldwide dance music has followed suit for decades, suggesting they were on to something.

ESSENTIALS

POP MUSIC’S ULTIMATE ADDITION BY
SUBTRACTION, DUB IS THE ECHO HEARD
ROUND THE WORLD
By Chuck Eddy

LEE “SCRATCH” PERRY
Arkology
ISLAND, 1997
1 Runty and rural from birth, Lee Perry was always given to feuds and fashion as crazed as his volcanic mixing-board manipulations. If he didn’t quite
invent dub, he did carry its bricolage
deeper into both the stratosphere and the
Earth’s core than anyone else. A;ter helping
ska evolve into reggae, he produced reggae
that was increasingly instrumental, then
as holey as Swiss cheese. Still, he pro-
duced the Wailers’ toughest music. These
three discs showcase his mid- to late-’70s
work at his own Black Ark studio.

KING TUBBY

TAPPER ZUKIE
Mah Ah Warrior
MER, 1973
6 A teenage toaster, shipped off to England by his mom to keep him off Kingston’s streets, revels in his not-always-apocalyptic
sense of humor: How else to explain
“Zukie Fashionwear,” “A Message to Pork
Eaters,” and especially “Archie the Red-
nose Reindeer”? Patti Smith, allegedly
enthralled by his more serious and
spacious selections, released this
sampler of early tracks on her label.
Those poets gotta stick together, y’know.

KING TUBBY
The Best of: King Dub
MUSIC CLUB, 2000
2 Radio repairman opens fix-it shop in Kingston, builds amps and echo units, concocts frugal, wordless versions of rocksteady singles for MCs to rhyme
over, twiddles large knobs to make the bass
boom, starts business to record one-off
pressings for his own sound system. If
Tubby originated remixing, as some claim,
he did it without losing the music’s blood.
In 1989, a gunman shot him dead at 48.

the melodica is with Pablo. In the mid- ’70s, this gentle Jamaican keyboard player cra;ted a meditative instrumental dub paying tribute to Hailie Selassie around his own pastoral whistling through the children’s toy mouth organ. Result: A New Age Rasta equivalent of Eno’s Another Green World, with melodies set in the Far and Middle East.

Armageddon. Starting in ’ 76, with Jamaica’s ghetto on lockdown, production visionary Joe Gibbs gave him thunderous backing to match. The Clash were impressed.

AFRICAN HEAD CHARGE
O; the Beaten Track
ON;U SOUND, 1986
7 London-born Adrian Sherwood was the most experimental and prolific dub producer and label exec of the ’80s. His crooners, rant-
ers, and rhythm sections were as likely to
be alumni of Rough Trade post-punk or
Sugarhill hip-hop as from Jamaica. Of
the numberless, o;ten ad-hoc studio
acts under his On-U umbrella, African
Head Charge had the he;tiest, most
barefoot groove; this is their he;tiest,
most barefoot record.

AUGUS TUS PABLO
East of the River Nile
MESSAGE, 1977
3 While fans of ’80s hack-rockers the Hooters might quibble, few musical instruments are so specifi- cally identified with one artist as

PRINCE FAR I
Silver & Gold: 1973;1979
BLOOD AND FIRE, 2005
4 Another tragic figure—murdered at home by robbers in 1983—the “Voice of Thunder” came up as a DJ and bouncer but was mostly a
prophet of doom, interpreting the Lord’s
Prayer, Wink Martindale’s country
homily “Deck of Cards,” and
select biblical psalms in anticipation of

BURNING SPEAR
Garvey’s Ghost
MANGO, 1976
5 In 1975, his sound already deeply immersed in Africa, this Bob Marley disciple and roots howler— real name Winston Rodney—
released his third album, a tribute to
turn-of-the-century Jamaican Black
Nationalist saint Marcus Garvey. A year
later his label unleashed this even more
powerful dub mix. “Jamaican surf
music,” Greil Marcus called it. “Which
is to say that slave ships are visible
on the horizon.”

MAD PROFESSOR
Method to the Madness
TROJAN, 2005
8 A tech geek who moved to London from his native Guyana t 13, the man born Neil Fraser performs chemistry experiments
on the cartoon cover of this definitive
career retrospective, subtitled Two
Decades of Crazy Dubs: A Trip-Hop,
Techno, Dubwise Vibe. The sonics depict
his science lab’s beakers bubbling over:
one disc with reggae stalwarts U Roy,
Horace Andy, Johnny Clarke, and Max
Romeo; the second primarily composed
of collaborations with art-punk and
electro-dance renegades the Ruts,
Young Gods, the Orb, Massive Attack,
and Perry Farrell.

GAB ARCHIVE;REDFERNS

78 NOVEMBER 2009 ; SPIN.COM GETS STAINS OU T FAST