Easy Star All-Stars - Dubber Side of The Moon Album Review

Back in 2003 the house band at Easy Star Records recorded a reggae tribute to The Dark Side of The Moon renaming it the Dub Side of The Moon. The album has since gone on too near mythical status spending a total of 7 years on the Billboard chart with the band in constant demand, touring worldwide. The Easy Star All Stars and their rotating cast of members also went on to record reggae versions of Radiohead's OK Computer (Radiodread) and Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Easy Star's Lonely Hearts Dub Band). 2010 sees the Dub Side of the Moon revisited by a select number of well-respected, legendary producers such as Adrian Sherwood, Dreadzone, Mad Professor and renamed The Dubber Side of The Moon.

While it would be easy to view this as a novelty album, doing so without listening first would prove to be a serious injustice as this album is an innovative piece of music in its own right. On the opening track Speak To Me/Breathe In The Air, Dubmatrix incorporate very bass heavy rhythms combining their electronic influences and putting them to the fore. The resulting track comes across sounding like a dub reggae version of The Orb. The same pretty much goes for the Groove Corporation remix of Time which wouldn't sound out of place on the aforementioned's Adventures In The Ultraworld.

However, undoubted highlights of the whole album are not as you would expect Adrian Sherwood's take on Brain Damage nor The Mad Professor's Money, but Kalbata's take on Any Colour You Like reinvented as a full-on futuristic dubstep trip and The Alchemist's remix of Money. This album should not work when you read it on paper, and in lesser hands it could have gone so horribly wrong. but it didn't and the resulting music makes The Dubber Side of The Moon a triumph!

7/10

Scott Causer