At King Tubby's With the Roots Radics

Barry Brown, along with the likes of Johnny Osbourne, Linval Thompson, and Tristan Palmer, was a quintessential singer of the early dancehall era. While roots-era vocalists like Cornell Campbell and Slim Smith began their careers as members of rocksteady vocal groups that imitated the tight harmonies and soaring falsettos of American doo-wop and sweet soul, Brown and his peers cultivated a decidedly grittier aesthetic, singing in a straightforward, comparatively untutored style that ideally complemented the stripped-down rhythms and minimal arrangements of early rub-a-dub. At King Tubby’s with the Roots Radics collects the a-sides and b-sides of half a dozen of Barry Brown’s most punishing early singles for Jah Thomas’ Midnight Rock label, including “Movements of Jah," a righteous recut on Dawn Penn’s “No No No” riddim, and the insistently propulsive “Girlfriend." Each vocal side is followed by a spacious instrumental dub mixed by Scientist, a young protégé of King Tubby whose productions highlighted the relentless instrumental work of the Roots Radics band and whose hallucinatory, bass-heavy mixes helped define the sound of early dancehall.