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In difficult times, it is natural to come together and seek safety in what feels familiar; to bolt doors and windows, turn up the music, and catch a breath for a moment before life comes crashing in again. Better if in the company of someone who shares the same passions, the same outlook on things, and if a thin wisp of acrid-smelling smoke snakes its way outside from under the door, well, let's just hope the local patrols are not in the area tonight.
You prepare a fortress within which to withstand the anxious siege of perceived reality, and you fall back on what you know best to seek the reassuring warmth of habit.
Which, if you have a morbid inclination for abyssal bass, if you are obsessed with syncopated rhythms, and especially if you have around you a dozen or so of the most prominent figures of modern and past dancehall, then it means: A) you are The Bug, B) you have nailed the album that best summarizes the spirit of the times we live in.
The assault is furious from the first to the last chapter of this London Zoo, and the different vocal styles of the MC's and the (minimal, it must be said) variations in rhythm are not enough to loosen the pressure that oppresses our temples as we mindlessly turn the volume knob until clouds of plaster start falling from the ceiling.
The stylistic guise of the album is that of the purest dancehall, with the DJ selector arranging the tracks and the vocalists taking turns on the pieces, but the end result is something extremely modern and menacing, and it's no coincidence that The Bug is also Techno Animal, God, Ice, and has collaborated with Zorn, Justin Broadrick, Alec Empire, Dalëk, Mark Stewart, and many others. The most radical influences in music over recent years, from dub to industrial, from techno to free jazz, lend their charge of noise subversion to the expansive foundations forged by the artisan The Bug, and it doesn't matter if the microphone is taken by some fallen star (Tippa Irie, Ricky Ranking) or innovators of a dazzling present (Spaceape, Warrior Queen), the result is always extraordinary and strikes hard with compactness and precision.
No mushy dubstep here: reverberated and raw beats like a blade of grass playing its cards in the cracks of sun-baked asphalt, basses piercing the decaying flesh of intestines and sending vital stimuli to the soles of the feet that refuse to stay still, nursery rhymes in Jamaican patois summarizing ancient wisdom and modern miseries.
That's it, and for me, it's the best of 2008.
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