Post-punk legend Jah Wobble has a new LP out. Dub Volume 1 is a 8-track album that collects a few tunes which first appeared digitally during the COVID-19 pandemic, and matches those with a number of fresh ones. 

Wobble’s distinctive, distinguished, oft copied, never quite equalled bass-lines – something he seems to have been born to play – define the record, but the set is also in a very large part a celebration of the cultural melting pot of his East End childhood home. This is reflected in track titles, Dub In The East, Tragic Slav Dub, and Old Jewish East End Dub, and in the use of instrumentation and sound effects. Cinematic Bollywood strings, the plucked zing of zithers, romantic, melancholic Romany violin, dockside foghorns and police sirens all add a little historic local colour. 

The production packs in plenty of brass. Massed fanfares, muted horns and smokey sax solos. Drums are broken, shuffling syncopation stuttered by echo, jazzy breaks and tumbling, delayed runs. Piano is sparse and plaintive throughout. Losing All Sense Of Balance rides an appropriately lop-sided rhythm. Eccentric and explosive, its elements flying in from all angles. Sweet Dub is soulful rocksteady. The vocoder-ed, vari-speed vocal-ed Lovers Rock Dub is more synth-y. Something of an epic, Existential Dub goes deeper, darker, with dynamic rimshots, darting, dancing fills, dramatic orchestral stabs, strange scatted vocals and wicked wah-wah flickers. Wobble’s bass, while treated, twisting and turning, on this tune is very OG Jamaican roots.

The toughest customer is a remix of Tyson Dub, a tribute to Wobble’s dearly departed beloved Staffordshire bull terrier.* Its bottom-end is twanged, gurgling, belligerent, while its beat is a beefy, boisterous thud. Spiralling signals, cascading bleeps, snatches of melodica and theremin contrasting and offsetting the music’s muscularity.

*I interviewed Wobble the week that Tyson passed away, and for a moment we stopped when John looked up to the top of the stairs and the spot where the dog would wait for him. 

Jah Wobble’s Dub Volume 1 can be ordered directly from Dimple Discs.

I got my copy from Tom Dubwise.