eephour wrote:Two Sevens Clash is a classic.

Shit, that's a good record. I haven't listened to it for a long time.

Big Youth, Screaming Target, from the same era. Also titanic.

tmidgett wrote:Augustus Pablo, East of the River Nile or King David's Melody or Original Rockers. Or most of the other million ones, but those are surefire.

Who'd have thought a melodica could sound so good?

The Leonard Chin/Errol Thompson Santic stuff feat. Pablo, Horace Andy, Big Joe & I-Roy is some of my favourite dub/reggae. There was a really good compilation called Santic and Friends, not sure if it's still available. The sound is quite lean, but initimate.

Burning Spear's Marcus Garvey is kinda my pick of the genre. And I like the dub version Garvey's Ghost, stripped of most of the vocal, even more.

That Congos album transcends them all though. I've lost the second disc of the CD though, with the 12" 'disco' versions.

Ernest Ranglin is a decent jazz/reggae guitarist too, coming out of ska to play on many reggae sessions.

I have a good friend who has this huge music collection and all it is is renaissance music and dub. There may be a Zep record in there somewhere but that's pretty much it. Renaissance music and dub, hundreds and hundreds of records. It's pretty strange and cool.

For anybody who's only casually interested in reggae (and Jamaican music in all its forms), it's hard to recommend a compilation more highly than this:



Three-and-a-half CDs of the best of the best, basically a primer on the history of the island's music, with not a weak track. (For me, the collection bogs down only with the dancehall stuff in the last half of the last CD.) This thing presents a musical legacy that, for an island with the population of Utah, is fucking unbelievable. Great jumping-off point for further exploration.

Cranius wrote:Burning Spear's Marcus Garvey is kinda my pick of the genre.

I'm not a big fan of the genre, but I used to have this album, and I thought it was pretty great.

Has anyone heard I-Roy's album Exodus Chapter II - The Ten Commandments? It features I-Roy reciting the 10 commandments over the songs of Bob Marley. It's very...how you say...special.

tmidgett wrote:The Congos, Heart of the Congos, on Blood and Fire or whatever other version you can find. If you don't like this, just give up.

I got this record today and it is supreme.

Hear of the Congos is superlative.

I can second Screaming Target and Marcus Garvey as essential albums. Also worth mentioning King Tubby Meets the Rockers Uptown, Super Ape and Forces of Victory.

Oh yeah, and Police and Thieves of course.

This post has already made me feel grim, the reggae music for listening and not listing.

Ravel's Bolero was the first dub song.

Cranius wrote:Has anyone heard I-Roy's album Exodus Chapter II - The Ten Commandments? It features I-Roy reciting the 10 commandments over the songs of Bob Marley. It's very...how you say...special.

No, but I've got a lot of Prince Far-I and he's done something similar, though I don't recall it being set to any of Bob Marley's music. Thankfully. No offense. Now that I think about it, pretty much all of Far-I's songs are Old Testament-based, if that's your thing.

Funny that this thread should pop back up today. I listened to some reggae for the first time in probably six months just this afternoon: Keith Hudson's Flesh Of My Skin, Blood Of My Blood. Great record.