Dub Syndicate - Strike The Balance

Strike the Balance is Dub Syndicate at their most playful, a 1989 On-U Sound session where the covers are almost as strange as the originals.

By the end of the 1980s the arrangement was well established: Style Scott laid down rhythms with Jamaica's finest session players, Adrian Sherwood took the tapes back to London and rebuilt them into something that sounded like dub heard through a wall in the next building. This album is where that partnership got confident enough to be funny. It moves between straight-faced reverence for the tradition and a genuinely mischievous streak, sometimes inside the same track.

Cuss Cuss brings Bim Sherman in to sing over the Lloyd and Devon rhythm, and his voice has always been the most beautiful thing on any record it appears on. Je T'aime is the record's outright provocation, a version of the Serge Gainsbourg song with Shara Nelson, years before Massive Attack made her famous, delivered with a straight face that makes it work. Mafia stretches past seven minutes into pure heavy dub, and Hawaii is exactly as absurd and lovely as its title promises.

Ten tracks, and the sequencing never lets you settle. That was always Sherwood's real trick.