Reggae diggers know: any tune produced by Junjo Lawes, backed by the Roots Radics and mixed by Scientist is cop-on-sight. As an early protege of King Tubby, Scientist (née Hopeton Overton Brown) manned the boards for some of the deadliest roots and early dancehall sessions in Jamaican music history. He is perhaps most well known for helping to pioneer the dub album: collecting spacey b-side “versions” of various roots & dancehall productions mixed by a single engineer and pressing them all to a single LP under a unified theme, building on the foundation laid by Tubby and Lee “Scratch” Perry. Scientist’s dub albums all have imaginative themes, and Scientist Rids The World Of The Evil Curse Of The Vampires is the most well known and perhaps the wildest, flipping rhythms culled from albums by Michael Prophet, Johnny Osbourne and Wailing Souls into heavy, stripped-down, spaced-out dub excursions. Check Scientist pulling up the rhythm and re-firing the bassline on the sparse and cavernous “The Corpse Rises”, a world apart from Wailing Souls’ original “Bandits Taking Over”. Scientist employs ‘nuff lasers and space echo magic, overlaying sound bytes of sinister cackles and moaning vampires (“I WANT BLOOD!”) to create a perfectly smoked-out soundtrack for warding off evil spirits. This double vinyl version includes the original vocal cuts on the second LP and a giant fold-out poster. Recommended.
- double vinyl version w/ vocals + dubs
- bonus disc includes original vocal versions
- remastered sound
- includes foldout poster
- music label: Greensleeves Records 2016
reviewed by peanut dust 03/2017