“Hunting,” the track that opens Keith Hudson’s 1974 album Flesh of My Skin, Blood of My Blood, probably doesn’t sound like any reggae song you’ve heard. It certainly doesn’t sound like many I’ve heard, its intoxicating and mysterious lo-fi swirl of psychedelia a kind of genre unto itself. It’s under two and a half minutes long but endlessly rich, atmospheric but rendered unrelentingly heavy by the sheer density of its bass—the kind of low-end blowout that would put any soundsystem to the test. But there’s nothing here that moves with the upstroke skank of rocksteady or the deep, soulful strut of roots reggae, propelled instead by hypnotic nyabinghi drums, bird whistle, twangy spaghetti western guitars and the rustling of leaves. Hudson pulls back the branches just enough to allow us to peer into the dark path of the unknown.
Keith Hudson had released a handful of albums prior to Flesh of My Skin, Blood of My Blood, but on this, his fifth album, he had progressed down the line from more conventional reggae songwriting toward a more idiosyncratic sound, as well as one that increasingly came to showcase the atmosphere of early dub recordings. In fact, its predecessor, Pick a Dub, contained a simplicity that represented dub at its purest, its stripped-down riddims in stark contrast to the spaced-out echo of King Tubby in the succeeding years, or the oddball sonic treatments of Lee “Scratch” Perry. But Flesh of My Skin, Blood of My Blood strays from any straightforward path into mystery and menace, revealing the mystical alchemy that would earn Hudson the title of the “Dark Prince of Reggae.”
Flesh of My Skin is a curious blend of unconventional sounds and approaches, but Hudson wasn’t an outsider by any means. His studio space at 127 King Street was in the same building as one occupied by a rising group called The Wailers, and he’d racked up a number of standout productions in his early years. While running a dental lab at age 23, Hudson held an early recording session with famed Jamaican singer Ken Boothe, producing the single “Old Fashioned Way,” a deeply soulful song with a conspicuously prickly organ twinkle, which he then spun into a deejay version with famed toaster U-Roy. His recording of the stark deejay groove “S.90 Skank” with Big Youth yielded an early hit. And within a couple years, he’d rack up a number of recordings with the likes of Alton Ellis, John Holt and Delroy Wilson.
None of which would predict Hudson’s boldly exploratory turn on Flesh of My Skin, Blood of My Blood. Recorded in London during a pivotal moment in which Hudson sought to reinvent himself as an artist rather than merely a producer, the album showcases Hudson’s dark and chaotic vision through some of his richest recordings, employing the performances of reggae ringers such as guitarist Earl “Chinna” Smith, nyabinghi clerics Count Ossie and the Mystic Revelation of Rastafari, and famed melodica maestro Augustus Pablo in a set of songs that merge sounds and styles, hope and anger, presence and atmosphere.
The centerpiece of the album is “Darkest Night,” a song that’s showed up on a handful of Hudson’s records, including 1981’s Playing It Cool, Playing It Right, and which can fairly accurately be described as his signature song. Driven by wah-wah guitar licks and an ominously heavy bassline, with reverb-heavy vocals and female backing vocals, it’s rich headphone candy. Yet it’s thoroughly unsettling in spite of that—reggae at its most sinister. It’s reggae as funk as Delta blues, a meeting with the devil at the crossroads in the humid wilds of Jamaica.
That bluesy sensibility courses throughout the album, like on the minor-key grooves of “Fight Your Revolution” and “Talk Some Sense (Gamma Ray),” with Bunny McKenzie’s jangly guitars lapping up against heady synth twinkles and the distant siren song of a reverb-cloaked backing vocalist. They’re deeply funky and righteous in their condemnation, their closest contemporaries in reggae at the time would perhaps be an anthem like Bob Marley’s “Get Up, Stand Up,” but still miles apart. Hudson’s lyrics are often more oblique and imagistic than outwardly activist, but more so than on previous recordings, he adopts an anti-colonialist perspective—inspired by the writings of Frantz Fanon—emphasizing women and matriarchy within its themes of Afro-Caribbean pride. A cover of Bob Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released” is woven into its threads of identity and liberation, with some slight liberties taken as he personalizes its narrative: “So I remember every face of every man who brought me here.”
There are moments of lightness and space that arise and cycle back throughout Flesh of My Skin‘s fire and brimstone, sinister grooves and cavernous bass. A buoyant and bright recurring melody of plonking keyboards first appears in “Flesh of My Skin” and then its dub, “Blood of My Blood,” and again on the album’s second side. They’re rays of light, particles of hope that keep its dark night of the soul from getting even darker. You can almost visualize the sun descending over the horizon on its closer “Stabiliser,” an echo of the opening “Hunting” with thick syrupy Hammond organ and melodica. It’s a soulful closing credits theme, not quite as ominous and bewildering as its opening counterpart, but the darkness isn’t gone—you can still sense it on the periphery, and creeping ever closer.
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