Headlong, fierce, banked rasta drumming fit to discombobulate any kind of system, with sweet, jazzy trombone riding it down, bubbling bass driving it home, and all of it classically dubwise.
Wareika Hill Sounds is the contemporary roots reggae project of Calvin Cameron — mainstay of the original Light Of Saba line-up, the genius behind Lambs Bread Collie — who to this day lives above the headquarters of the Mystic Revelation Of Rastafari, in the Wareika Hill district of Kingston, Jamaica.
In the great pedagogical traditions of the multi-cultural Light Of Saba, and before that Count Ossie, this new recording runs together two JA musical traditions — a kind of drumming (and drum) brought from the Congo, and the island’s variation of calypso — into a thundering grounation charge. As always, the Skatalite’s trombone-playing is majestic: deadly, gripping, deeply cultivated.
The dub is tremendous, too.
Last box!

The triumphant revival of this humdinger, forty years after the original version, released on JA/UK label One Love.
Expertly recorded at Tuff Gong, and just around the corner from us in Ladbroke Grove, this is Black-Atlantic, one-drop majesty, with Rasta drumming, resplendent horns, and thunderous dub. Empress Sharon is so nice she nails it twice.
Painfully timely. Mash up creation and look what happens.

Including a secret-weapon version of Baltimore.

Freddie in his heyday like this was one of the greatest singers in reggae history.
He’s in soaring, inspirational form here, riding a hard-as-nails Niney rhythm.
The organ-led dub is dazzling. Mark Ernestus from Rhythm & Sound recently opened a set with one of its incarnations, at the already-legendary Open Ground club in Wuppertal.
Both sides, classics.

Cool and deadly DC, over a giddily deep re-cut of the same rhythm as Wayne Jarrett’s monumental Brimstone And Fire.

Rohan Lee for his own Rainbow label in 1990. Spirited sufferers, with tasty muted trumpet and lovely, expansive harmony singing. Recorded at Channel One and mixed at Aquarius.

Spiritualised, easy-grooving and spacious late-seventies roots. Upsetters-style woodblocks, stumpy bass, ace backing harmonies. AT himself is strikingly sincere, determined, hymnal. Jackie Mittoo had a hand in it.

Ferocious Niney genius.
Tommy McCook leads the swingeing horns, galloping east of the River Nile. Sounds like Dennis Emmanuel Brown, wailing six feet under. A jaw-dropping, no-prisoners Tubbys dub.
Red hot terror.

Superb late-eighties digi, with all the trimmings.
Al Campbell in top form at the mic; classy horns and backing vocals; rollicking rhythm; masterful, frolicsome Niney production.

Tight, heartfelt, urgent sufferers. Niney when the two sevens clashed.

At their chilliest, most magnificent and dread. 
Brilliantly remastered; one-sided.