Trojan CD TJBDD361
This 2CD set from Trojan - clearly named in response to Island's "Arkology" - collects together 3 classic Lee Perry albums from the height of the legendary Black Ark era (1976-1978). "Scratch The Super Ape" (also released as simply "Super Ape" on Island, but here presented in its original JA mixes and running order) is a mostly-dub album using riddims from well-known Black Ark vocal tunes; "Roast Fish, Collie Weed & Cornbread" is a vocal LP by Scratch himself, and "Return of the Super Ape" is a mixture of the two. The second CD also contains some hitherto-rare bonus tracks from the same period.
"Scratch The Super Ape" opens, in its original order, with "Dread Lion", a scene-setting tune with a dark dub ambience, fuelled by horns, melodica and flute as well as vocal chant from The Heptones, and snippets of scat and effects. It feels like Scratch introducing himself with his dread credentials: "king of the jungle, king of the forest, strong like iron"... "Zion Blood" carries on the same dread, triumphant vibe over Devon Irons's "When Jah Come" riddim: "African blood is flowing through my veins, so I and I shall never fade away", dub-blurred drumbeats and lazy yet heavy brass in the rich background.
"Three In One" has more of a poignant yet playful vibe, sounding as if it might in its original form have been a love song, turned instead to a mellow, pastoral-feeling tribute to the "African chalice". "Curly Dub", despite its name, has no relation to Junior Byles's "Curly Locks", being instead a mostly-instrumental dub with some snippets of what sounds like Perry himself talking/scatting and a slow yet insistent trumpet, which later on in the tune turns out a virtuoso solo which is frustratingly half-hidden behind multiple layers of dub. "Patience Dub", as its name suggests, is another slow yet insistent dub, with half-heard vocal samples, half-muted call-and-response horns and a head-nodding drumbeat, fuzz and echo gradually increasing over its 4 1/2 minutes.
The title track "Super Ape" once again seems to be Perry's self-proclamation through the vocal medium of the Heptones, manifesting himself as the joyous yet implacable "ape man trodding through creation". Really deep, somehow subdued yet still unease-inducing bass frequencies and ghostly bird-call noises used as percussion give a mysterious, trance-like primordial swamp vibe.
"Croaking Lizard" features Prince Jazzbo toasting over a dub of Max Romeo's unstoppable classic "Chase The Devil", the vocals stripped away to reveal the deliciously kinetic steppers bassline and metronomic percussion, while Jazzbo quotes freely from other Max Romeo tunes such as "War In A Babylon"; an exercise in rhythm guaranteed to mash up any dancefloor. "War In A Babylon" itself is the version fodder for the next tune, "Black Vest", again stripped down to unmistakeable basics but with other ingredients (such as a joyous horn riff) added. Snippets of the vocal from Max's other cut on the riddim, "Fire Fe The Vatican", can be heard alongside a sporadic, uncredited toast.
"Underground Root" features the female vocal trio Full Experience, chanting to the "collie root" on another murky, swampy riddim, with guitar echoed almost to oblivion adding to the spooky ambience. "Dub Along", also featuring Full Experience, finishes the album, playfully exhorting the listener to "come along with me", snippets of piano livening up an otherwise fairly plodding dub. While Scratch himself does not contribute vocals (beyond a few samples) to this album, the overall feel is strongly that it is he as auteur conveying a playfully cryptic message through the various vocalists on it.
"Roast Fish, Collie Weed & Cornbread" is an album of Scratch's more direct expression, with his own lead vocals on every track. The funky and bouncily irrepressible "Soul Fire" kicks it off, Perry in manic, celebratory mode, doing the classic reggae trick of turning the threatening, even doom-laden into the joyous: "Soul fire, and we ain't got no water!" "Throw Some Water In" is something of a stream of consciousness, Perry preaching his eccentric health advice using a car engine metaphor over clashing cymbals and cut-up female backing vocals, also seemingly singing an island dweller's praise of the aquatic element, perhaps in balance to the "fire" of the previous track.
"Evil Tongue" is a classic Perry diatribe against hypocrites, and a proclamation of his superior intelligence and inevitable victory over them. "Curly Locks" is, of course, Perry's own rendition of the song he wrote for Junior Byles; a surprisingly sweetly and melodiously sung love song with playful yet seductive backing vocals, and also containing the surreal insult "your father is a pork chop" (which always reminds me of Monty Python). This appears (as with "Soul Fire") to be the same version of it as on "Arkology".
"Ghetto Sidewalk", opening with a sardonic trumpet riff and featuring various creaky, springy and glass-shattering noises as percussion, is Perry's call for an end to poverty and deprivation, but simultaneously a celebration of the vibrancy of Jamaican ghetto life, with also a keen sense of irony: "One thing I'd like to know, where does all the tax payer's money go... Don't say I'm malicious, I'm just a little suspicious". "Favourite Dish" is an eccentric tribute to JA cuisine, garnished with samples of crying babies and the trademark Upsetter cow noise, as well as cymbals and other percussion in the mix. "Music is the key, blend in harmony"; Scratch's alchemy is the mixing of bits of everyday observation into a collage of the sublime and the ridiculous.
"Free Up The Weed" is a righteous defence of JA's ganja-growing economy: "Some plant coffee and some plant tea, why can't I and I plant collie?". Perry effortlessly exposes the hypocrisy and ludicrousness of banning something natural and "made from creation", over an appropriately blissful and head-nodding musical backdrop. "Big Neck Police" is a re-titled "Dreadlocks In Moonlight", a classic swirling, joyful Black Ark mix with anthemic female vocals and Dean Fraser's beautiful sax perfectly complementing a righteously Biblical-inspired, yet still playfully humorous lyric condemning hypocrisy while displaying Scratch's love of metaphor: "You send a sprat to catch a whale, little did you know Jah Jah shark was on your trail". A justified Black Ark classic.
"Yu Squeeze My Panhandle" is another cryptic, stream-of-consciousness proclamation, wittily appended "I hope you penetrate this one". A stripped-down drum and bassline riddim is enlivened with bits of scat vocal and clattering percussion noises in typical Upsetter style. The closing track "Roast Fish & Cornbread" is a classic piece of eccentricity, summing up the themes of the rest of the album, its clip-clopping riddim lurching magnificently along with heavy echo, staccato piano and the great cow noise machine; this is a much rawer, bass-heavier mix than the one found on "Arkology". "Fear not and dread not, skank it in the backyard!"
The album "Return of the Super Ape" opens with the uptempo rocker "Dyon-Anasaw", with its celebratory horns (taken from the Studio One classic "Freedom Blues") and Full Experience chanting nonsense syllables, a perfect expression of the Upsetter's uncomplicatedly happy side. "Return Of The Super Ape" comes second, despite sounding like it might have been intended as an intro track; it's one of Scratch's most abstract and ambient dub excursions, crashing noises and snippets of conversation abounding over deep reverb and a fractured trumpet solo with an almost cinematic feel, oddly recursive changes in tempo making it seem much longer than its 3 1/2 minutes: one for deep herbal meditation.
"Tell Me Something Good" is another bouncy Full Experience tune, which is nice but fairly inconsequential. "Bird In Hand", however, is a truly breathtaking oddity, with a deep, mystical, ethereal vibe and a ghostly, fragile double-tracked lead vocal (thought to be Sam Carty) singing in what many had surmised to be Amharic or another mysterious African language, but turns out to be phonetic Hindi, taken from a Bollywood film song (the origin story can be found here). One of the Black Ark's transcendent moments.
"Crab Years" is another nice, warm-feeling yet ultimately somewhat forgettable dub, lacking as it is in vocals or anything else particularly interesting. "Jah Jah A Natty Dread" is far more gripping (and another highlight of the album following, perhaps deliberately, a relatively weak track): a heavy, propulsive uptempo riddim with wildly crashing drums and swirling, spooky organ, with Scratch on top scatting and ranting form, passionately proclaiming against the Pope, the Devil and other "baldheads"; unhinged in all the good ways.
"Psyche & Trim" continues the theme, albeit a little more cryptically, but clearly enough condemning the greedy, corrupt and exploitative ruling class: "Mister Top Ranking, you gonna get a spanking!", once again over a lively, stepping piano-fuelled riddim. "The Lion" brings back a bit of the joyful, playful vibe (and more strange creaking and groaning noises), Scratch again toasting righteous rhymes in a self-assured tone, with a tinkling boogie piano solo hovering in and out of the mix.
"Huzza A Hana" is another loosely swinging and semi-improvised feeling track, with funky slap bass, jazzy sax and whoops and yelps as interjections which almost prefigure the "oinks" and "ribbits" of 80s dancehall DJs, Perry returning to his "music is the key" lyric, except switching it playfully to nonsense variants like "huzza in the key". The final track "High Ranking Sammy" is another humorous swipe at the pompous and powerful, over a slowed-down, ponderously stomping riddim with plenty of fuzzy echo and percussive noises.
The bonus tracks which fill up CD2 start with Clive Hylton's "From Creation", a hitherto extremely rare vocal tune which, while satisfyingly righteous and rootsy in its slavery/repatriation lyric, unfortunately sounds like it was recorded in a bucket at the bottom of a well (although some might say this adds to its ambience). It's followed by 3 different dub mixes, which, while of slightly better sound quality, are really insufficiently different from each other to merit the inclusion of all of them; the last is probably the best, as the bass and echo is heaviest and some trace of the vocal is retained on it.
The 7" mixes of "Roast Fish & Cornbread" and its dub are also included; these are much closer, if not identical, to the Island mixes, with the vocal much more to the forefront and less bass and echo. Finally, there is U Roy's "OK Corral", a version to the "Return of the Super Ape" riddim, possibly even more stripped-down and bass-heavy than the dub, with U Roy drawling phrases from Western movies amid loud metallic crashing and glass-shattering noises - almost certainly one of the Upsetter's starkest and most abstract productions, somewhat reminiscent in fact of some of the wilder works of Prince Far I. (now that would have been a collaboration...)
This compilation showcases Lee Scratch Perry at his most undiluted and extreme (at least for his "classic period" 70s works). While those seeking transcendent vocal harmonies of the type found in works for Perry by the likes of the Congos, Meditations or Heptones, or uncompromising political rootsiness, are likely to be disappointed by perhaps the majority of tracks, fans of Scratch's eccentricity and overall prankster-genius vision will find this absolutely essential. Some of the material contained here is available elsewhere, but for the most part in far worse sound quality than here, and Trojan is to be commended for bringing together these previously only unevenly available classic albums, and several otherwise hard-to-find bonus tracks, on a nicely packaged double CD. Scratchophiles, obtain without hesitation for heavy dub meditation!
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