Label: Nonplace Format: CD,LP
Burnt Friedman‘s latest gathering of musicians from the Northern and Southern Hemispheres brings together the usual Dub influences with a healthy dose of fractured Funk and Souldful vocal stylings and brass arrangements. As such, it’s a heady slice of Post-modern collage and remodelling, from the strangely-parcelled version of the “Fuck Back” 12″ with its laid back, slightly sinister vocal from Theo Altenberg onwards. Proceeding via the Seventies groove of “Fly Your Kite” where Abi Abi reaches for the heights of emotional lyricism through the heavyweight drums and bass pressure he chants up for “Paternoster” and screws up into headfuck space, Perry-style, for “Dublab Alert”, a certain epiphany is reached in radically overhauled remix of/collaboration with His Name Is Alive on “Someday My Blues Will Cover The Earth”, Lovetta Pippin‘s aching words set into a harmonious musical spin.
Other vocals come from Patrice, whose more Rootsy style contributes rambling poetic Rasta flourishes to the Dubwise “Get Things Strait” and “Life Is Worth Dying For”, the underpinning informed by the cut-up slips and reverses of Microsound as much as the extremities of On-U Sound production. Words slur into echoing harmonies, the percussion of Jaki Liebezeit holding tight under the weight of bass. However, Friedman’s production techniques are applied with a discipline which ensures plenty of space for the tunes and melodies to shimmer though the haze of effects. Everything flows so easily that the transition from one song to another is often barely perceptible, providing a continuous mix of smoothly-delivered grooves, with a lyrical bite to Abi’s “Real Abstraction” where he ruminates on the continuing world crisis.
Perhaps it is an intended irony though that there is a track called “Designer Groove” – as with some of Jimi Tenor‘s more grandiose excursions into the outer precints of Jazziness, there is a certain stylized coffee shop atmosphere created by “Can’t Cool”, even when the Reggae influence is heaviest as on the Dub version of “Get Things Strait” – vibes, upright bass and melodicas tend to have that slightly effect. In all though, the album is entirely pleasant in its narcoleptic cruise, swimming in positivity and luxurious production values which are anything but formulaic while being part of a recognizable tradition. Who could deny the langourous chill generated by the closing “Consider A Bigger Wallet”, where Shaft-scale arrangements are dubbed into broad swellls of liquid dynamism, charting an epic conclusion to an album bursting with good-natured warmth.
-Linus Tossio-
