Heavyweight Dub/Killer Dub

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Heavyweight Dub/Killer Dub album cover
Album Information
EDITOR'S PICK

Total Tracks: 19   Total Length: 59:53

eMusic Review 0

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Vivienne Goldman

eMusic Contributor

10.07.05
The thunderous, intelligent dub technique that made Inner Circle beloved stalwarts of reggae’s Golden Age.
Label: Blood And Fire / Virtual

Inner Circle's rhythm architecture was so powerful that they survived the car crash death of their charismatic lead singer, Jacob Miller, one of Jamaica's greatest voices, performers and personalities. Mixed by Maximilian and Prince Jammy at King Tubby's studio, these 1978 tracks show why the band was able to sustain such a brutal loss. Many tracks stem from two much-loved Miller releases, Jacob "Killer" Miller and Wanted, including “80,000 Careless Ethiopians,” which he always sang con brio. Their radical consciousness may not come through in the lyrics, but the titles state where Inner Circle are coming from. "Peace Time Now" recalls the band's involvement in organizing the 1981 Peace Concert designed to defuse the violent Kingston ghettoes, which was famously headlined by their close friend Bob Marley. These dubs from way back, then, demonstrate the thunderous, intelligent dub technique that made Inner Circle beloved stalwarts of reggae's Golden Age.

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audio quality report

tn-rudeboy

Encoder [LAME3.96r] Encoder Options [--preset standard -b128] Average Bitrate [137 kbps vbr]

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First-rate old school dub

rolfb

Complete agreement with the previous reviewer. Very organic-sounding oldstyle dub: Too Much War is a perfect example. If you have any interest in dub, you should have this.

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Very, very heavy dub.

jhvd

This is dub the way I like it: a perfect combination of great grooves and natural-sounding studio effects. For me this works as well on a Friday night as it does a Sunday morning. There's no reason not to have this album.

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Dub

By Vivienne Goldman, eMusic Contributor

Call me a leggo beast (Jamaican patois for "wild one"), but I reckon there is no more significant genre of 20th-century music than dub, the first music to use the studio as an instrument. Its essential arsenal of echo, phasing and reverb was first sharpened by Kingston's King Tubby, working with four-track tape machines, and has been greatly extended by today's technology; yet the force of the original tools, and those mind-blowing sounds, has never… more »

They Say All Music Guide

This disc is comprised of two dub albums released by Inner Circle in 1978. At that point, Inner Circle was more popular in Jamaica than Bob Marley & the Wailers. Their singer, Jacob Miller, was already famous for songs like “Tenement Yard” and “Tired fe Lick Weed in a Bush.” Most of the rhythms from which these dub tracks are derived were originally released on the albums Killer Miller and Wanted; they were dubbed by Maximilian at the Channel One studio and by Prince Jammy at King Tubby’s. On the program are dub versions of “Land Called Home” (rendered here as “Addis Ababa Rock”), “Killer Miller” (“Killer Dub”), and “Standing Firm” (“Frelimo”), among others — in typical Blood & Fire fashion, the liner notes specify most of the relationships between dub and vocal versions. It’s too bad that more of Miller’s vocals weren’t left in some of these mixes, but the rhythms themselves are rock-solid and Prince Jammy’s dub treatments are particularly sharp. Listen carefully for “Deck the Halls.” – Rick Anderson

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