Duff Review: Horace Andy "Midnight Rocker"

Vinyl LP/CD/digital
On-U Sound
2022

(Review by Steve Shafer)

Like his superb collaborations with Lee "Scratch" Perry before his death (Rainford and Heavy Rain, which I reviewed here and here), Adrian Sherwood's latest effort with Horace Andy yields another masterpiece. Midnight Rocker is easily one of the finest albums in Andy's catalogue and certainly one of the best new roots reggae records you'll hear this year.

At 71, Sleepy's seemingly ageless voice remains in top form--always wonderfully expressive, whether conveying empathy for those suffering or passing along Jah's unyielding judgment on the wicked. He's backed by an all-star band, including Gaudi, George Oban (Aswad), Skip McDonald (Sugar Hill Records house band, Tackhead, African Head Charge), Douglas Wimbish (Sugar Hill Records house band, Tackhead, Living Colour), Horseman (Prince Fatty, Mungo's Hi-Fi, Mad Professor), and more. And Sherwood's virtuoso production--his first for Andy(!)--bathes everything in crisp warmth and life, and leaves plenty of space for Andy to do his thing.

Midnight Rocker contains a mix of new tracks and re-worked versions of Andy classics, some surely chosen for their heightened relevance today. The album opens with a fantastic rendition of Andy's plaintive "This Must Be Hell" (first released as a Tapper Zukie-produced single in 1978), Things may have been bad in the late '70s, but they have nothing on our everyone's-always-at-each-other's-throats times. This more sparse take on "Materialist" (which was originally produced and released by Niney the Observer in 1977) still packs a punch: "Material comes first in this society/You can't afford a car or a house, no one knows you" (and the track also warns of giving into vanity and acquiring too much). Andy's 1976 reggae lullaby "Rock to Sleep" is beautifully and hauntingly updated with cellos. And even Sleepy's much-revisited, Studio One/Coxsone Dodd-produced single "Mr. Bassie" is given a great new spin with this tightened-up take. (If you compare all of these versions to their originals, you'll be pleased to find that Andy has much more control of his singing, and his voice is arguably stronger and more nimble than ever.)

Like the reworked classics, Andy's new cuts are like late-night, pirate broadcasts of hope and warning--a rebel counternarrative for these entropic times. "Easy Money" (penned by Jeb Loy Nichols and Sherwood) is a melodica-driven sequel of sorts to his 1975 Phil Pratt-produced single "Root of All Evil" (key lyric: "It make friends/It break friends/Judas betrayed Christ for it!") that is an oblique critique of our capitalist way of life: "Tell me why/Did I ever start/To make money money/You did me wrong/You been cheating me/My whole life long." The stately "Today is Right Here" (by Sherwood/Nichols/Oban) reminds one that life is tenuous and fleeting, so you need to enjoy/be in the right now ("See that old black bird flying/See that fox on the run/They don't think about tomorrow/'Cause it might never come"). Despite its topic, "Careful" (by Leigh Stephen Kenny/LSK and Sherwood) is a bright and jaunty track about the pernicious disinformation we're swimming in daily ("All that glitters is not gold/All that's written is not so/Pictures, scriptures always told through the eyes of victors, all I know"). With all the turmoil, dangers, and moral quandaries to navigate these days, Andy pleads to Jah--over a Lover's Rock cut (written by LSK/Gaudi/Roydel Johnson aka Congo Ashanti Roy)--to "Watch Over Them." We need all the protection we can get.

One of my favorite tracks on Midnight Rocker is the cover of Massive Attack's "Safe from Harm" from Blue Lines. For all of Andy's past work with Massive Attack, this song from their 1991 debut--inspired by Martin Scorsese's neo-noir nightmare Taxi Driver (it's about Travis Bickle expressing his compulsion to protect the teenage prostitute Iris)--was originally sung by Shara Nelson. Yet hearing Andy singing it in this urgent, slightly futuristic dubstep-reggae setting (that rumbling bassline is ominous!), you don't think of Jodie Foster, but rather whoever means the world to you and you'd be devastated to lose: "But if you hurt what's mine/I'll sure as hell retaliate/You can free the world, you can free my mind/Just as long as my baby's safe from harm tonight."

While Midnight Rocker immediately appealed to me from first play on the turntable, I've been listening to it on and off for weeks now--and still don't think the album has fully revealed itself to me yet.

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Duff Review: Various Artists (Selected by Don Letts) "Version Excursion"

(Review by Steve Shafer)

For the uninitiated, Late Night Tales is a long-running series of compilations, each selected by a musician with the goal of creating what they consider to be their ultimate, mood-setting "late night mix." The latest release is Don Letts' mighty and marvelous Version Excursion (Heavyweight double LP, LateNightTales, 2021), which reflects his omnivorous musical tastes: '60s rock, Black American R&B and soul, punk and post-punk, and--of course--Jamaican and British reggae and dub. This is expressed through Letts' selection of dub covers (many of them exclusive remixes personally solicited by Letts) of songs by Aaron Neville, Jefferson Airplane, The Clash, Joy Division, Stevie Wonder, The Beach Boys, Lou Rawls, Marvin Gaye, Kool & The Gang, Bill Withers, Althea and Donna, Randy Newman, Merle Travis, The Bee Gees, War, The Beatles, and others.

Letts, the British-born son of Windrush generation Jamaican immigrants to the UK, grew up straddling the divide of white and Black music and culture--and during the advent of the mid-'70s punk scene, he was hired as the in-house DJ at London's infamous Roxy club (punk's ground zero), where he effectively introduced/turned on the British punk scene to reggae and dub in between sets by The Clash, Damned, Buzzcocks, Slits, Generation X, etc. (since so few punk records existed at the outset of his two-year DJ residency there in early 1977, he spun a lot of reggae!). Letts went on to film all of The Clash's music videos (as well as others for The Psychedelic Furs, Musical Youth, The Pretenders, The Undertones, Fun Boy Three, Eddy Grant,  Elvis Costello & The Attractions, Public Image Ltd., Bob Marley & The Wailers, and more); co-found Big Audio Dynamite (read my review of their reunion show in NYC in 2011) with The Clash's Mick Jones (he made BAD's music videos, too); direct many music documentaries, including The Clash: Westway to the World (which won him a Grammy), Soul Britannia, and The Story of Skinhead; and work as a DJ on BBC's Radio 6. Also his 2008 book Culture Clash, Dread Meets Punk Rockers is essential reading (and he has a new one out, too).

Many of the cuts Letts spotlights on Version Excursion are phenomenal reimaginings of their source material (though a few are so deconstructed as to be rendered almost unrecognizable, unless you consult the track listing--see Wrongton Meets The Rockers "Dub in the Supermarket" and Black Box Recorder's "Uptown Top Ranking"). Stand out tracks abound. Prince Fatty & Shniece McMenamin's "Black Rabbit" (their take on Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit," which I previously reviewed here) is an alluringly menacing dubby trip, while Zoe Devlin Love featuring (Dub Pistols') Tim Hutton's version of The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds track "Carolina No" is a gorgeous lover's rocker. The exclusive remix of Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart Again" by Capitol 1212 featuring Earl 16 is stellar and may even top their original (I reviewed that mix here). Cornell Campell's recasting of Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On" as "Ital City Dub" is mind-blowingly good, as is Dennis Bovell's new remix of his old band Matumbi's "(Can't Get Enough of) That Reggae Stuff," which is their read of Kool & The Gang's awesome "Funky Stuff."

According to Letts' track-by-track liner notes, The Clash used to warm-up in rehearsals to Ernie Ford's "16 Tons," which is given an incredibly dread spaghetti Western reggae dub by French act OBF. Japanese producer Yasushi Ide enlisted U-Roy for a wonderfully melancholy cover of Bill Withers' "Ain't No Sunshine" (love all those strings!). The Tamlins' read of Randy Newman's "Baltimore" (an indictment of everything that contributed to the decline of Black urban cities in the late '70s) is blistering. At one point in his teens, Letts had amassed an enormous collection of Beatles memorabilia, but once punk struck (The Clash: "No Elvis, Beatles, or Rolling Stones") he exchanged it all for a car (which he eventually got rid off, since the coppers kept pulling him over for Driving While Black). Having said all that, he never lost his love for the Fab Four and has included the Easy Star All-Stars featuring Matisyahu's wild dub of George Harrison's "Within You Without You."

The track that I keep coming back to here most is Gaudi Meets The Rebel Dread featuring Emily Capell's superb version of Big Audio Dynamite's "E = MC Squared" (which Letts co-wrote with Mick Jones). Part of it's nostalgia (it's a key cut from the soundtrack of late teens), but this mellow reworking is just perfect (the repeated descending piano riff toward the end of song is brilliant!).

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