Hold On To Your Genre : Dub

Off the Beaten Track: Dub meets post-punk and industrial

The Slits – Cut
(1979; Island)

England’s Slits were not a dub group in the traditional sense. Their recordings were all live, and involved little in the way of studio manipulation or remixing. More importantly, they were a post-punk band, and specialized in abrasive, agitated sounds. But the sounds they were agitating were essentially reggae or dub in nature. The Slits’ debut album Cut is, for all intents and purposes, a dub record played on live instruments, with a lot more shrieking and confrontational politics. But despite more prevalent guitar-bass-drums arrangements, and fewer space-age effects mastered by the likes of King Tubby or Prince Far I, Cut frequently hews pretty close to the Jamaican template. But it’s what they do on top of that template that makes it extraordinary, be it the stunning pop harmonies of “FM” (stands for ‘frequent mutilation’) or the disorienting reggae-punk of “Typical Girls.” All reissues of the album now come packaged with the group’s cover of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” as well, which is beyond kickass. – JT

Missing Brazilians – Warzone
(1984; On-U Sound)

In the 1980s, the British On-U Sound label, founded by experimental-minded producer Adrian Sherwood, released some of the most challenging titles ever to be called “dub.” Sherwood’s own Missing Brazilians made certain of that on their one and only full-length album, Warzone. True to its title, the album is a harrowing trek through ominous and explosive sounds, blasts of effects and psychedelic disorientation. There are certain uptempo tracks whose hyperactive and skittering percussion serve as precursors to jungle, but elsewhere, there are even stranger ideas being constructed into Frankenstein’s monsters of tape-slice menace. “Frequency Beast” is the most terrifying of these tracks, blending distorted crashes with avant garde tonality and a general sense of darkness. Yet “Savanna Prance” is downright funky, its eight minutes taking the listener on a thrilling, epic ride through deafening booms and unstoppable grooves. The album also features some vocals from Shara Nelson, who later collaborated with Massive Attack on their groundbreaking album Blue Lines, though here her role is still secondary to the reggae-tinged terrorism Missing Brazilians conduct. – JT

African Head Charge – Off the Beaten Track
(1986; On-U Sound)

One of the more successful acts to emerge from Adrian Sherwood’s On-U Sound label, African Head Charge nonetheless took a pretty atypical approach to dub, layering in samples of found sound and voices over percussion-heavy tracks. The central figure in the group, Bonjo Iyabinghi Noah, provided much of the percussion, but African Head Charge kept few permanent members throughout their evolution, and notable names like Public Image Limited’s Jah Wobble and label head Sherwood, himself, lent their talents to recordings. Off the Beaten Track is a fitting title for AHC’s fourth album, which has a similar psychedelic feel as that of Missing Brazilians, but without quite as much darkness. The mixture of odd voices floating in — one of which belongs to Albert Einstein — makes it a disorienting experience, but a cool one. And their influence can be heard on any number of later acts, from the DFA roster to The Books, as well as Primal Scream, who nicked the bassline from the title track on their single “Kill All Hippies.” – JT

Next: Dream Beat – Ambient dub and modern mutations