Hard Grind

リトル・アックスによる2作品が〈On-U Sound〉より初のヴァイナル・リリース!
エイドリアン・シャーウッドによる時空を超えた音響デザインとスキップ・マクドナルドの燻銀なギター・プレイがブルージーに響き渡るブルース・ダブの名作

2002年にリリースされたリトル・アックスのアルバムが、初のヴァイナル化!リトル・アックスはギタリスト、スキップ・マクドナルドのブルースを色濃く反映したオルターエゴであり、彼はシュガーヒル・ギャングのバックバンドとしての活躍やタックヘッドのメンバーとして知られるほか、〈On-U Sound〉の膨大なカタログにおけるアレンジも数多く手がけてきた。

夢のようで朧げな暗号めいたアルバムで、聴き手の時間や空間の感覚をゆっくりと、そして怠惰に覆い尽くしていく。シンガーの歌声の断片が霧の中から幽霊のように漂い出ては再び霧へと戻り、緩やかで官能的かつ蒸気の立ち込めるリズムに絡みつく。マクドナルドの圧倒的で控えめなギタープレイを包み込む、その誘惑的なミックスはうねりながら忍び寄る。これはデルタ・ブルース聖典の沼地の奥底から響いてくるかのようで、エイドリアン・シャーウッドによるスモーキーでダブアウトされたエフェクト、ループ、エコーチェンバーが全編に散りばめられている。時空を超えた音でありながら、この場所以外にない必然を感じさせるのだ。
- Thom Jurek, All Music

本作はもともと米国〈Fat Possum Records〉からリリースされた作品で、今回ヴァイナル用にエイドリアン・シャーウッドがエディットを手がけ、ザ・カーヴァリー(The Carvery)のフランク・メリット(Frank Merritt)がリカットを手がけた。

Little Axe's debut album, The Wolf That House Built, issued in 1994, created the mold for Moby's Play album -- and he knows it. With its blend of deep, slow-grooved beats, loops, sampled voices of blues singers, heavy dub reggae effects, kicking drums, and wailing guitar, it was the roots music precedent to the bald one's fine record by half a decade. Eight years later, Little Axe returns with a new set that will no doubt be compared to Play when in reality it is in a league of its own. The sophomore effort issued by legendary reggae producer and mixmaster Adrian Sherwood, guitarist Skip McDonald, bassist Doug Wimbish, and drummer Keith LeBlanc is a dreamy, hazy cipher of an album that settles slowly and lazily over the listener, displacing his or her sense of time and space in the mix and then turning his or her approach to listening to blues and rhythm inside out. It features the voices of bluesmen telling stories and snippets of singers wafting ghostily out of the ether only to re-enter the mist and wind themselves around a slow, sultry, steamy rhythm, a heavily seductive mix that slithers around McDonald's awesome and understated guitar playing. It comes from the swampy underbelly of the Delta blues bible, and Sherwood's smoky, dubbed-out effects, loops, and echo chambers are everywhere, with sounds that come from out of time yet seem to belong right where they are. The set opens with a read of Blind Willie Johnson's "Dark Was the Night Cold Was the Ground," with his voice coming out of the grave and talking about the blues. On "All Night Party," the late Junior Kimbrough's voice entwines with those of absent friends and collaborators such as historians, preachers, and the players themselves with a shifting, careening mix that turns the blues motif into the fifth element, in the terrain where it encounters the seam of reggae becoming undone. On "Walk Right Shoes," country blues gets the hoodoo treatment, and the refrain of "Riding on the White Horse" is as much a metaphor for heroin as it is for a ride to heaven amid the voices of some well-known blues-rock greats. Overall, the record is spooky, almost mystical; it's a soundtrack for a film that could never be made, so complex is its plot (and blood) line, and is more enjoyable than anything Ry Cooder ever laid down for celluloid. This is music from another world; its roots are swindled, warped, and turned upside down and inside out, but they are never disrespected. The notion of song is ever-present and hypnotic; the continuity and consistency in the mixes from one track to the next are without peer. Hard Grind is the album that should have been the soundtrack for writhing late-night sexual trysts, dark morning soul-searching, long drives into the unknown, and sitting still and staring into the face of oblivion. ~ Thom Jurek