Review Summary: These songs all feel like they should go in the Great Jamaican Songbook, each lithely balancing a folky sensibility for deploying melody as the path of least resistance to storytelling with an intense focus on catchy, ear-wormy hooks.
Before dub music was incorporated into the sonic weave of British art music following the dissolution of punk culture in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, and certainly before the genre formed the blatant aesthetic backbone of 2007’s
Person Pitch, my favorite album to fall asleep to in early teendom for precisely its dubby qualities, the genre served to generate and work through a whole host of aesthetic-philosophical pressure points specific to Jamaican musical culture.
Like dueling Congolese soukous-to-rumba visionaries Franco Luambo and Tabu Ley Rochereau, pioneering Jamaican producer Lee “Scratch” Perry, who died just a little over a year ago at age 85, as an individual presided to an unusual degree over the development of a niche musical movement whose sonic prophecies scratched some social itch or other enough to become a genre, a set of musical strategies and references that can itself be modified into clearly derivative but fresh forms. Perry’s overriding aesthetic trick was to expand sounds, to make them longer, more resonant, and more lively through the application of mismatched tape reels and disorienting, but usually inexpensively sourced, studio effects (as with The Beatles or William Basinski or Mercury Rev, Perry was highly interested in how the inherent limitations of physical media can be emphasized rather than downplayed to generate an alien yet grounded shock of sonic beauty). The effect of this expansion (which sometimes takes the form of particular sonic oddities, but often feels like the result of a production blanket laid down over the entire track) is relaxing, aquatic, dreamy—therapeutic on the whole. There’s something vaguely solitary and inward-pointing about dub music, and Perry was often happy to hold back, let something thump around a bit in space, to underscore absence. (This latter element would come to serve as an invaluable aesthetic strategy for the legions of late-‘90s/early-‘00s microhouse producers who ripped from Perry’s book and whose albums I by and large love.)
Yet whereas, due to this abstract creative association between new manifestations of dub music and the general mood and vibe of its classic albums, I feel like I know some albums like
Roast Fish Collie Weed & Corn Bread or
Super Ape, I’m not sure there exists another album quite like 1977’s Perry-produced debut by roots reggae duo The Congos, the absolutely delectable
Heart of the Congos. It is impossible to untangle what exactly dub music “meant” for Jamaican culture from its individual manifestations—i.e., why the sound, which is so telltale and unique and formulaic at once, emerged how it did, when it did. But
Heart of the Congos provides a crystal-clear vision of its beautiful utility, if not an answer to the question of its emergence
per se. The classic production elements of dub—which, as I said before, often influenced music that trended on the side of minimal, Janus-faced, reserved—are all there, including the squeezed-top filter for the guitar and drums, the church-choir echo on falsetto sensei Cedric Myton and tethering baritone Roy Johnson’s vocals, the random animal noises. As per the genre’s “roots” designation, however, Myton and Johnson are talking about the *** that’s real to them, and the *** that’s real to them is generally stuff that you can’t see: philosophical issues and subjective, internal phenomena like justice, faith, persistence. Myton and Johnson mention individual people, but only really as ciphers, as representatives of some other concept, in a way that feels almost Homeric for its implying consistency of states and an eternal present: the fisherman will always row his boat, the children will cry in the wilderness forevermore, you keep on knocking but you can’t come in, every morning the black sun rise.
I am utterly moved by this vision of eternity because the melodies on
Heart of the Congos, with the exception of the anomalously loopy and amelodic (but very cool withal) second track “Congoman,” all feel like they should go in the Great Jamaican Songbook, each lithely balancing a folky sensibility for deploying melody as the path of least resistance to storytelling with an intense focus on catchy, ear-wormy hooks. The bouncy, anthemic “Fisherman” could have been written 150 years ago; the poignant ballad “The Wrong Thing,” a million. These angelic lilts, lifts, and dips—as they are written into the songs and as they are performed vocally by the duo—feel very righteous indeed to hear unfold; the extremely wide frame of The Congos’ spiritual and moral concerns, combined with the welcomingly woozy sonic background and their deliciously clean vocal melodies, makes them seem like good musicians for sure but also good people. I don’t know how to explain the means through which The Congos are able to make their music feel community-oriented just by writing melodies that are so good that that
can’t have been the first time, right?
The uncanny but also weirdly harmonious dynamic between the defamiliarizing aural contours of
Heart of the Congos’ dub production effects and its ripped-from-the-cultural-subconscious sequences of stepwise movements and leaps on a melodic scale secures the album as infinitely replayable, a classic record that lunges forward and backward into the annals of musical history, lunging inward toward knowledge of the self but also graciously outward toward love of the world. Their network of lyrical references is dense and sometimes esoteric, but they ultimately ask of and with their listeners questions that would occur to anyone who accumulates the requisite spiritual criteria: how can life get so much worse when I’m going to church so often? What must I give of myself to this world, and what is it that I must instead wait to be given? Why did they sell Jah Rasta for thirty pieces of silver? Calming, rejuvenating, and adventurous throughout its entire 45-minute duration,
Heart of the Congos deserves thunderous applause for its incredible consistency as an album and sonic buoyancy as an expression of utter ardor for the mysterious relationship of day-to-day life trials and spiritual affairs. The experience of listening to
Heart of the Congos can function as a bit of a history lesson, given dub’s eventual diffusion into so many different, nominally unrelated strains of musical culture—without trying to draw out precise family trees, it can be interesting to see where Myton and Johnson’s radical openness to spiritual experience was upheld, where modified, where sloughed off, in its successors. But the ultimate prize of an artwork that so labors to synthesize heaven and earth is its own autonomous architecture of pleasure, its transformation of sound (the classically exaggerated attack and decay of a snare, say) into philosophy (the lingering sonic footprint formalizes if not “represents” a sensation of increased permanence, of things staying where they are even as they leave). And then, too, the album’s generosity, its bizarrely disarming honesty and kindness, its utterly human qualities. Put it in the Library of Congress, shoot it off into space for the Martians, purchase one of Neil Young’s discontinued audio players and rip a 75GB FLAC file of this album onto the device. When the Judgment Day these guys worry so much about actually comes, you’ll at least know you have this resplendent music to appease even the angriest of gods.
