Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

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Mojo JANUARY 2020 - by Andrew Perry

LEE 'SCRATCH' PERRY: HEAVY RAIN

Scorching dub tilt at this year's top-marks Rainford album.

Released in June, Rainford, the fourth collaborative vocal album made by Perry alongside his Anglo sparring partner Adrian Sherwood, may well have been their best - a late-career high for both parties. Its dub shadow, Heavy Rain, is every bit as excellent, delivering all the ear-tickling/rib-rattling sonics of Scratch's '70s Black Ark era, updated for the post-millennial digital age. Given that, now eighty-three (possibly), he operates more these days as an auteur/vocalist than a producer, this feels like a classic On-U extravaganza, on tracks like Space Craft furthering the panglobal textures of Sherwood's mid-00s solo records, and throughout winning the listener over to music of befuddling abstraction. A heavily phased-and-filtered recut of groovesome Makumba Rock, appositely entitled Here Come The Warm Dreads, features Brian Eno somewhere in the mix. Equally sublime are three tracks featuring veteran trombonist Vin Gordon, including Crickets In Moonlight's glorious echoes of pre-war New Orleans jazz. In summary: reggae/dub comes no more vital, nor far-sighted, in 2019.