Elsewhere: Rolling in dub and loving every minute

By GRAHAM REID

You know how it is, there's either very little around or the stuff just rolls in and you have to find spare corners to stash it. Reggae music we're talking about, of course.

Right now there seems an embarrassing amount of it around, so this short sharp column is a consumer guide to some of the more interesting. Locals up first.

International Observer, Seen (Loaded): Auckland dub duo Rakai Karaitiana and Tom Bailey (former Thompson Twin and Stellar producer) who make up International Observer drop a stone-cold gem with this debut album. IO reach back to the early days of slo-mo dub, bring to bear a melodic sensibility to keep the interest high, splatter some vinyl surface noise along the way for lo-fi authenticity and keep the focus in a series of contained, slightly dreamy but thoroughly wide-awake tracks. Unequivocally recommended.

The Black Seeds, Keep on Pushing (Loop): Wellington's popular, large-format outfit (horns, lap steel guitar and others) cover all styles of Jamaican rhythms from slow ska through reggae-pop and dub. And producer Lee Prebble adeptly keeps it all in check while bringing artful dub sensibility to the fore.

The pop element sometimes recalls Herbs' Pasifika style (Sit There, Black Sunrise, What We Need) and if some of the material sounds a little undernourished and the vocals lack distinctive character, this is an otherwise enjoyable, if not exactly essential, outing. Would dearly love to hear Prebble's dub plates of these tracks though, he's on to it.

King Tubby, King Dub (Nascente): Murderously heavy deep bass ragged-riddum 70s dub from one of the finest of Jamaica's practitioners. Doubt it? Sample the minimal Executioner Dub or Black and White Dub based on the chipper rhythms of Cherry Oh Baby. Tubby made heart-attack dub.

Various, Channel One: Maxfield Avenue Breakdown (Pressure Sounds): Late 70s dubs and instrumentals from one of the less-acknowledged Jamaican studios, but one which commanded a stellar roster of players, including Sly and Robbie, Ansel Collins, Sticky Thompson, Tommy McCook and others, all of whom appear on these 16, often truncated, tracks. One for scholars more than the casual, self-induced dub casualty.

Lee Perry, Divine Madness ... Definitely (Pressure): This superb compilation captures Perry the gifted, focused producer more than the wayward creative studio artist he often was, and is the better for it in short sharp tracks. There's also a second disc which is a remarkably lucid (albeit edited) 26-minute slurry word thing, from radio interviews (recorded over three separate occasions from 84 to 91) with the man who redefined the parameters of the listening experience through music. His spoken word waywardness is often pure poetry. The best Scratch collection after the triple disc Arkology. Memorable songs, exceptional dub miniatures (So Strong Skank), spoken magic, Jah and Jesus, and ... Oh, essential.

Lee Perry, Born in the Sky (Motion): How much is too much Scratch? By my count Perry recorded close to 30,000 tracks in three years - at least when the re-issues come along you get that impression. The man never stopped working.

This typically idiosyncratic 22-track collection appears to repeat nothing from the three triple-album box sets of the mid-80s, the Arkology set or any other collection. Of interest, but only so-so sometimes.

Gregory Isaacs, Mr Isaacs (Blood and Fire): And how much is too much Gregory? Never enough actually. The Cool Ruler has one of the sweetest, most soulful JA voices, and this re-issue of his fourth album from 77 (with additional tracks and an extended version of the hit Mr Brown) shows him at his best, just before he signed to Virgin and went global.

Well-chosen or distinctive original material (Slavemaster and Set The Captives Free have become reggae standards), powerful messages delivered with subdued understatement ("I was given as a sacrifice to build a black man's hell an' a white man's paradise," he croons) and the customary excellent liner notes from Blood and Fire. A classic.

Various, Dub/Original Bass Culture (Metro): And if none of the above language made any sense, here's your primer in dub, the x-ray music out of Jamaica in which producers take a backing track and then mess it up with echoes and odd sounds, vocals fading in and out, or simply strip the thing back to the skeleton and add whole other vocal and instrumental tracks.

This excellent 16-track collection includes sample material from some of the names above (Tubby and Perry mostly) and comes with useful, concise liner notes for beginners.

If dub is new concept, start with the albums that bookend this column: one drops you in the deep end, the other allows you time to get your head around the changes.