0.5-Tone: future ghosts

"I dread to think what the future will bring ..."

Never mind 2-Tone, what about 0.5-Tone! The Specials and their ska-bothering mates were OK, but in many ways it's what they helped engender that's more interesting. And what's that, Professor Niluccio? - you politely enquire. Actually, I'm not overly sure myself - but I think it might be that the channelling of all those Jamaican sounds into UK pop music left an important trace. Planted a few seeds etc.It's not just the (often amazing) melodies. I'm also thinking about the oddness of some ska and rocksteady (not least the DJ-ed reworkings). The "Tsk tsk tsk" clicking/whipping/giddy-up noises, the shrieks, the excellent vocal interjections ("yeaaaaaghhh", "don't call me scarface", impersonations of Lee Van Cleef and Eli Wallach or whatever), the deep Jamaican voice with its unmistakable vowel intonations. And of course ... bass. Beneath the jaunty surface there's a lot of weight to ska. It only takes a couple tweaks and you're plunging into some pretty deep water (reggae, the murky depths of dub). This is clearly the case with Ghost Town - a freewheeling deconstruction of a ska-pop tune. It feels as if it's been subjected to gravity, heavy manners, the drag of reggae/dub. It's been put through the blender. And also made more Jamaican/otherworldly than most British pop music. Yeah, whatever. What if, though, the experimentation of Ghost Town was taken two or three steps further? Including having that old car from the promo video driving around east London with a couple of punctured tires (pressure drop), lurching, skidding, grinding along, barely moving. Yep - it's 0.5-Tone! Welcome to the empty dance floor. There's no-one there at all. Just the haunted echoes of music past and the subterranean rumbling of furture ghosts ...

This record's coming like a ghost record 

1: The Specials, Ghostly Town

2: The Fucked Up Beat, Phonograph recordings sleepy city

3: Qulfus, Tears in vain

4: Actress, Forgiven

5: Bernard Grancher, Les ravages du bonheur

6: Monkeeastronaut, Dissociative hallucinogenic compounds

7: Ms Dynamite, Danger

8: Kode9 & The Spaceape, Sine

9: Rip Rig + Panic, Try box out of this box

10: The Slits, Liebe und romanze

11: Lord tang, I heard it through the tang

12: Alessandro Cortini, Perdonare

13: Marrach / Bad Poet / Chtin Mara, Habitus poeticus

14: Kamikaze Deadboy, Over the rainbow

15: Fields Of Ohio, Song of industrial America

16: Blanketship, Blanketown

17: Aphex Twin, Jynweythek

18: Namma, Reincarnate

19: Bagel Project, Dust time

20: The Specials, Gangsterish