Dub Trio "New Heavy" (ROIR)
By Ben Taylor
Friday. Jun 23, 12:02 AM
A pointless excursion into metal-tinged ambient reggae.

New York’s Dub Trio attracted plenty of press attention with their first album, Exploring the Dangers Of, two years ago, but I never actually met anyone who thought it was any good. Three jam band refugees playing instrumental dub seemed innocuous enough, and being signed to legendary dub/punk label ROIR offered some sort of guarantee of quality, but it didn’t really pan out that way. The tunes were marginal and the production was boring, and with no vocals to drift in and out, you were left with some occasionally spooky sonic wallpaper, very uninspiring compared to some of the great Jamaican dub of the ‘70s, or even producer Bill Laswell’s future-rock grooves in the 1990s with his band Material.

As good as some of Laswell’s records are (and only some: the man puts out a lot of music, and a lot of crap slips through), he’s also responsible for the watering down of dub, dub for dub’s sake. Back in the day, dub tunes were made from the tracks of reggae singles, but with radical remixing techniques that emphasized the bass and drums and sprinkling fragments of the voice and guitars with liberal servings of reverb and other ghostly effects. As far out as a producer wanted to take a track, there was still a song in there, with changes to follow, and a vocal melody to drop back in at some point. But Laswell was one of the first to start making dub records from scratch, without deconstructing an existing song. Not a bad idea in theory, but this leads to lots of repetitive grooves, with hefty helpings of echo and not much else.

So that brings us to New Heavy. They definitely got the heavy part right, cranking up the guitar riffing and double-kick drumming like a bunch of high schoolers who just stole their first Slayer record. Mixing reggae and agro-rock is nothing new: Bad Brains did it 25 years ago (on ROIR, no less). But they’re delving into some sub-Soundgarden chunking here, beating that particular dead horse as if to distract listeners from the fact that their dub explorations aren’t terribly interesting.

With no one singing (except for an excruciating appearance by Mike Patton, providing an alternate version of “Not Alone” from his new Peeping Tom project, which the Dub Trio worked on), the attention is focused on what’s essentially some groovy background music, cozy bass and drum grooves with spacey guitar floating over it. Nothing inherently wrong with that, but every time you’re even close to settling into a nice contemplative mindset, they break the mood with some Rush-inspired wankery, like they’re self-aware enough to realize that the music needs something else, and then blowing any chance of tastefully figuring out what something is.

This isn’t a bad album per se: just unnecessary. These guys know how to play and they’ve got a great grasp of rhythm and mood, but their vision isn’t clear. I can’t imagine they’re fun to watch live, either. Check out my earlier review of Future Pigeon for modern dub music that’s much more engaging for the listener. Those guys have stronger songs to work out on and more melodic material to build on top of an equally strong foundation. Whether or not the vocals and keyboards are always the primary focus of the music, they’re at least there to provide some much needed flavor. Dub Trio work fine as a rhythm section, but they need some better songs to apply their craft to. Hypnotic rhythm and ganja-fueled audio tomfoolery only go so far these days.
www.dubtrio.com
www.roir.com

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Ben Taylor

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