There are some artists who deliberately stand in the face of all music genres and instrumentation and challenge themselves to include every banjo and casio blip in their own personal chip tune electronic punk opera. The Dub Chieftain from Glasgow Scotland (of course!) is one of those genius/maniacs who is making sounds the only way he knows how.....with whatever is on hand at the time. A crazy unique mess that by design isn't going to temotely sound like anything else.
Take "Rockabilly Zombie" which could be a digital avatar of Tom Waits trapped like Max Headroom leading this army of loop bots around in static filled lines. I'm guessing that's E. Coleman on vocals there and he's possessed in the back of this mix. The rhythm is a cycle of hisses and between TV channel sounds. The future is not pretty. A complete crazy mess that takes damaged electrical circuitry sounds and pokes them into pop holes. They aren't going to fit exactly but no one has tried to solve the puzzle like this before. It's attempting to take the cast off detritus sounds, the completely damaged pieces and force them into a backwoods folk future. You could imagine a future where digital stuff; old satellite dishes from side yards in rural Kentucky gradually gave way to busted hovercars and mountains of motherboards. Redneck junkyards in a larry the cableguy future and The Dub Cheiftan is just on his back future porch banging away again on bluetooth amps with a couple of drunk robots. He's a mess but he's also gotten beyond being inebriated completely, he's hit that old legend, iconic kind of zen that's channeling a weirdo with a VHS tape headband.
B-Side "Fitness Fanatic" opens on thudding rave beats, blown out kick drums turned digital and creepy synth lurking in the background. Huge bursts of random static come in, blown out nicely and harnessed for this repetitive loop. Primitive samples of watery DX7 swoops and a digital fill here or there makes me actually see this working in a gym from the early '80s. Fluorescent leotards sweating your ass off to this pounding beat that gets into your head and drills down to the primitive flight cortex which can make you tear your own ears off. Like some kind of audio steroids its lulling you into a heavier path. This will never end and hypnotize forever. Powerless to stop it. Just on and on breaking you like groundhogs day, you can't even commit suicide anymore - this beat is deciding when and how you will die. Good luck.
Get this from Metal Postcard Records.
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