Ain’t no house like Waterhouse for Black Crucial, Anthony Johnson, Junior Reid and co.

Lovely, mystical, incantatory, roots singing over a deep, knock-off-Rhythm-&-Sound rhythm.

Melting, copybook Lovers Rock from 1977.
Willie Lindo, Harold Butler Robbie Lyn and co at Federal. Marcia Griffiths on backing vocals. A classy Waiting In Vain.

Anti-war deadliness — stripped, direct, heartfelt, with a murderous dub, mixed by Phillip Smart at King Tubbys.

Stone classic. Stuffed with monster Lee Perry rhythms like War In A Babylon.

The first decent compilation of these Clement Bushay productions.
Downright crucial Jazzbo like Step Forward Youth and Every Nigger Is A Winner.

Sweet, implacably socialist lovers, re-phrasing the Still Cool classic beloved by Shaka (and its metrical debt to Jah Jah See Them A Come).
Produced by Adrian Sherwood; with George Oban from the original Aswad crew, playing bass.

Go straight to the head-spinning dub. Magnificently zonked, killer music emanating from the wildly creative seismic crack which links the Upsetter in Kingston to Bullwackies in New York, and both to Half Moon in Toronto. Man called Fitty leads the Ishan Band, on flute and saxophone; Jerry aka Keith absolutely smashes it, at the controls. From 1978.

Jerry Brown was a founding member of rocksteady aces The Jamaicans, long before migrating to Canada. He helped Oswald Creary establish the Half Moon label; he set up his own Summer imprint in 1974. Both labels shared the same studio, in the basement of Creary’s house, on a dead-end street in Malton, Ontario, a suburb of Toronto. Local and visiting reggae alumni would hang out and make music: Jackie Mittoo, Willie Williams, Johnny Osbourne, Prince Jammy, Stranger Cole, Alton Ellis…

Originally out on Joe Morgan’s Fish Tea in the mid-eighties, reprising his classic Basement Session for the digital era. Extended mixes, with mean electro bass on the dub.

Taking its name from Jezreel, the Biblical city founded by the tribe of Issachar, where God is said to have cursed Ahab for his greed, this singing duo’s debut Wackies album is steeped in rasta spirituality.

All Depends is an intimate, spare do-over of the Spiderman rhythm which Yellowman smashed with Operation Eradication: eight minutes of yearning and pleading, dosed with the stylings of the original Night Nurse himself.
I Put My Trust swaps religious for amorous devotion: musically it is more characteristically Wackies, reverberating but crisp as a biscuit, stepping but spaced-out. Neither track appears on the LP, Great Jah Jah.
Warehouse find; last box.

Stunning, high-octane, steppers do-over of Yabby You’s Jesus Dread.

Three edgy, hard-nosed Wackies steppers.
The propulsive version of Home To Africa here is new to the world, from the original session tapes; and twinned with a nuggety version dusted down and polished especially for this release by Lloyd Barnes himself.