Land Of Kinks - The Jamaican Upsetter Singles 1970

Legendary reggae producer Lee "Scratch" Perrys imprint on the global creative arts was just as mystical as it was musical, and part of that was his superhuman output. Perry had a hand in the creation of so many songs and albums that its difficult to track just the classics, let alone any number of errant singles, stand-alone tunes, or records lost to time. Land of Kinks: The Jamaican Upsetter Singles 1970 zeroes in on a very specific phase of Perrys circuitous career, collecting 52 tracks put to tape during one of his commercial peaks in 1970. Though the timeline of dub is cloudy and much-debated, 1970 is still by most accounts a little bit before Jamaican producers were regularly cutting echo-heavy dub versions to augment vocal tunes. Land of Kinks is an interesting study in that which came right before dub, however, with much of Perrys production veering into wildly experimental and unconventional methods, dropping out instruments or scattering effects processing in a way that very much predicted some of what became standard practices for dub productions. The compilation is largely instrumental, making for easier inspection of this pre-dub sound. On the otherwise blase instrumental tune "Ferry Boat," Perry brings entire sections of the arrangement in and out of the mix in a rhythmic fashion, adding a surreal quality and providing a great example of how easy it was for him to use the studio as an instrument. There are distorted and reverb-saturated vocal hisses overlaid on "Bush Tea," sonic emulations of breaking glass and machine-gun fire on "OK Corral," and something akin to a lo-fi sound collage of organ and verbal incantations on "Kill Them All." Its a truly psychedelic reading of reggae, made all the more out-there with the realization that a lot of these tracks were singles aimed for commercial appeal. The Soulettes cover of the Beatles "Let It Be" and Perrys ramshackle instrumental version (credited as the Upsetters doing "Big Dog Bloxie") both take on a verifiable hit and still end up in bizarre places. This, of course, is all part of the magic that was Lee "Scratch" Perry. With many of these tracks appearing in the digital format for the first time, and almost all of them harder to track down on any format for years, Land of Kinks is yet another solid segmentation of Perrys bottomless discography. It crafts a wonderfully warped picture of a time when reggae was changing from the more straight-ahead sounds of ska and rocksteady into the wilder and less inhibited sounds of dub, and Perry was leading the charge. ~ Fred Thomas