Dubbing with Anansi

Neil ‘Mad Professor’ Fraser returns with another dub album, a medium in which this apprentice of Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry seems incapable of putting an audio signal wrong. Dubbing with Anansi takes its inspiration from a spider in Caribbean folklore that has pre-slavery African origins; Mad Professor promises to re-forge a forgotten link through dub music. The results are great, but they don’t exactly fit the description; the links with Africa are presumably the tropical birdcalls and hand-drum rhythms, which are ever-present throughout Mad Professor's previous work. This instead sounds like an afterthought to Experryments at the Grassroots of Dub, his 1995 collaboration with Lee Perry that still stands as a benchmark for the genre. Reggae stalwart Horseman features on drums, and applies his talents to the steel variety on ‘Lil Lopez’ for a distinctly Caribbean groove. ‘Maroon Attack’ is a thunderous sample of Junior Delgado's ‘Famine’, and produces a mean spike against the smoothness of the rest of the album. It's hardly new territory but Dubbing with Anansi fulfils everything you’d expect from an eight-limbed manifestation of dub's master-but-one.