African Dub All-Mighty, Chapter 3 album cover
African Dub All-Mighty, Chapter 3

Joe Gibbs & The Professionals

1978
Joe Gibbs Record Globe

All five volumes of Joe Gibbs & The Professionals’ African Dub All-Mighty releases are essential purchases, but Chapter 3 is the cream of the crop and one of the greatest dub albums of all time. As the other half of ‘The Mighty Two,’ Engineer Errol ‘T’ Thompson throws in a suitcase full of SFX amongst the shuddering low-end, rim shots and echo delay to create a feast for the ears. Hugely influential on its release in 1977 for artists both in and out of the reggae world (a soon-to-be PiL forming John Lydon among them), it still sounds box fresh.

Chris Catchpole

The Mighty Two, producer Joe Gibbs and engineer Errol Thompson, had their hands in a gang of Seventies releases in Jamaica. Joe Gibbs’s Professionals had a fair amount of personnel overlap with The Revolutionaries; this series of dub records—all five volumes of it—uses the Professionals to recut rhythms the Revolutionaries did first. All of the albums are solid gold, distinguished by Thompson’s love of sound effects: cartoon boings, sirens, synth squiggles, water, clanks. The bands are reduced to a beautiful retaining wall of bass hum and rimshots, lovingly encased in tape unit echo.

Sasha Frere-Jones

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