Dubblestandart :: In Dub (Echo Beach)

Already versioned a dozen or so times, one more this good is more than welcome. A big, muscular collection, a capital city on this year’s dub map.

With Dubblestandart, the heart of peace, love and understanding beats strong in the centre of a continent growing cold and spasmatic with neo-fascism. The Viennese duo of Paul Zasky and Robbie Ost have a baker’s dozen albums to their credit and, with “deepest respect for its true innovators,” In Dub brings out the bin-shakingist best in some great recent Dubblestandart standards, including a generous portion of last year’s Women in Dub, showcasing criminally under-recorded young voices like Saria Idana, AmA and Kira Nathaniel.

On the CD, half of the originals are molded into grand Henry Moore roundnesses and hollownesses by the duo, another six by UK stalwart and colleague Adrian Sherwood, while Bristol’s Rob Smith (of Smith & Mighty) wraps things up with characteristic on-the-edginess, having Marcia Griffiths hop from drumskin to drumskin on “Holding You Close.” The digital version includes five more tracks, including the gorgeously acoustic “Summerrain.”

“Another Life” is Caribbean in colour, eternal in breadth. The supersonicized “Soulmate” showers down fragments of the late, great Ari Up. Armed with a melodica, Lee “Scratch” Perry chases down the devil, determined to catch him and banish him to outer space. The burning issue of “carelessness in cannibas” is addressed on “Marijuana Dreams,” which appropriately segues into a narcotic cover of Marianne Faithful’s “Broken English.”

“Evil Burma” wends a Chinese spiked fiddle into what might be a protest song and “Logic of Liberation” featuring Hoda Mohajerani is a private jetliner (its second dubbing is more insistently punky). A particular highlight is the masterful Sherwood dub of Dubblestandart’s extravaganza “Chrome Optimism,” which features Scratch proclaiming hell very low and heaven very, very, very high, fragments of David Lynch musing about the source and impact of creativity and a tune based on Jean-Michel Jarre’s “Oxygene Part Four.” Already versioned a dozen or so times, one more this good is more than welcome. A big, muscular collection, a capital city on this year’s dub map.

In Dub is available on Echo Beach.