When
Neil "Mad Professor" Fraser
released the first volume of his
Dub Me Crazy
series in 1982,
reggae
was smack dab in the middle of its
dancehall
phase. That set, and its successive volumes, reflected a wider musical transition, simultaneously looking back to the
roots
/
dub
era, forward to the technology of
Wayne Smith
's all-digital
"Under Me Sleng Teng,"
and beyond. Volume 11,
Hijacked to Jamaica
, however, seems caught in musical limbo. The
music of the 1970s stripped
music down to its bare rhythm essentials. Keyboards, guitars, voices, and horns were reduced to ghost-like figures, inhabiting the almighty bass and drum tracks like elements from another world. From the sound of
, this is the
mixing philosophy in reverse. Working from the ground up, however,
Mad Professor
stops far too short in his attempt to build engaging structures. Skeletal, stuttering rhythms provide unimaginative templates while keyboard fragments outline rote
melodies that are just as forgettable. Add to this
Fraser
's relatively passive mixing on this set, and your left with electronic
, minus the unexpected twists listeners had come to expect from
releases. Tellingly, not even
Danny Thompson
's bass comes to the rescue. Lurking in the shadows, it sounds like it was accidentally left too low in the final mix. By the time of this release, the
Professor
was approaching the end of the series. Though he would prove that he was far from exhausting his studio skills with the excellent
Black Liberation Dub
, these recordings, along with 1993s
Dub Maniacs on the Rampage
, are the least inventive of the set. ~ Nathan Bush