Released
today! Jah Wobble's newest is a walloping great rethink of his magnum
opus, Metal Box (plus a couple of First Issue bonus tracks thrown in for
good measure). For anyone wondering what the point of this set is, why
he'd tackle a reboot of such a classic monolithic slab of post-punk
angular alienation, it feels like a perfect time to assess a journey of
some 40+ years as an artist by taking his most iconic work and
reinterpreting it through the lens of four decades of personal
exploration and artistic growth.
At the time it was originally
produced, Wobble was barely beyond being a novice as a musician. Yet
his latent talents came to fruition with remarkable rapidity and his
presence on the original Metal Box is essential to defining its
distinctions. The album belongs to him just as much as to Levene and
Lydon, but his bass is, unquestionably, the rock solid foundation upon
which everything else rests. So he's perfectly justified in wanting to
use those songs as a way to examine his past and juxtapose it against
his present by "rebuilding" the songs that made it possible for "The
Legend" to live on!
To be clear, it's not an attempt to replace
or supersede the original in anyway. That's simply an impossible task
and it's clear that's not what's happening here. What IS happening is
Wobble taking the liberties he's well earned to present these songs in a
fresh, updated context that fully integrates all he has to offer as an
artist today. There are times when it stick fairly close to the bone,
but then it'll freely fly off the handle in some unexpected way that
makes you hear the songs with virgin ears. It's both familiar and
alien, which is kinda what made the original special in the first place.
It's a bit more "rock" than I was expecting, but not in a bad way. It
has a toughness that cuts appropriately for the times where it finds
itself manifesting.
I'm sure there will be some purists who
will not see the point, but Wobble doesn't need anyone's permission to
mess with his own legacy. His brazenness is part of why this ultimately
succeeds as an exercise in using the past to remake the future.
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