African Dub All-Mighty, Chapter 3

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.

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.