Dr Strangedub (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Dub the Bomb)

This was supposedly written as a response to the ever-mushrooming sense of doom commonly experienced thanks to climate change, Trump, Brexit, etc. The way to ‘stop worrying’ suggested by Dub Colossus’ fifth album is to just ignore it all, lie back on some wavy bass line and ride the reverb into outer space.

Where his early albums featured more obvious collaborations with Ethiopian azmari musicians, Dr Strangedub, which comprises eight new tracks plus six remixes, keeps more in the dub practice of sampling the odd lyrical snippet, heavily filtering them through effects and laying them over prominent bass lines – though in this case, very, very chilled ones, and with an added dose of serenity delivered by cosmic guitar and trumpet solos that riff a jazzy stardust over the majority of the album.

Overall, it can feel a bit formulaic, and despite a couple of more upbeat moments – the groovy ‘Fight Back (Resistclubdub Mix)’ and the Cuban-influenced ‘Spy in the House of Dub’ – the tracks tend to blend into each other somewhat. Still, it's a sunny album; it won't solve your problems, but at least it might help you escape the world for a moment.