The Stooges are feted for "industrializing" rock and roll, their assembly-lined rhythms imitating Detroit factories that clanged together modern America's crux of survival. Later, Kraftwerk's "machine-music" romanticized the autobahn as a symphony where the daydreamers forget destinations and accident risks. Somehow dub reggae is lost in this discussion. Machines made classic dub possible. King Tubby and Lee "Scratch" Perry employed tape speeds, echoplexes, and delay boxes to mutate traditional reggae into after-hours hallucinations. The dub rhythm's traditional Caribbean element of hitting right on the four and nearly missing the beat, arguably resembles a machine worn by years of dried grease and friction.
Michael Campitelli (Calamalka) mostly captures dub's factory life in Shredders Dub. The Vancouverian's debut album has a rich atmosphere that inhabits a rehearsal space tucked underneath a junk-shop's trapdoor. Blistered hands master the music's craftsmanship. The raw beats are usually thwacked on a live trapkit like a sledgehammer-- quite a relief from the bald-shaven drum machines heard in so much digital-dub. The live basslines maintain a steady groove without either deafening the room or falling flat. Campitelli also avoids cluttering his lysergic excursions with the debris of aimless guitar strums and B-flick inspired "cosmic" noises that infest like flu germs. However, he's still faithful to dub's common dreariness and stubborn hope for salvation.
Half of Shredders' tunes are meant to shout through a car's disintegrating subwoofers in the dead of night. "Hear the Most" sets this mood by throwing the listener out into the moonless streets that, no matter the loneliness, are never empty. A distant funeral bell marks the time, as the ring-modulated voices whisper in one's ear, and the bass and snares stomp their feet like a stalker picking up the pace behind you. In keeping with Shredders' other bludgeoning raveups, those same footsteps could be mistaken for factories. "Chassi" connects dub to thrash and funk with distorted bass, a cement-shoed hip-hop rhythm, and a Rhodes that honks through a gridlock. The equally sinister "Bumpea" broods on the E-string with switchbladed rimshots and an orbiting satellite that recovers a lost broadcast of a keyboard played at a 1970 Miles Davis Fillmore gig. If Campitelli woke up a bit during the stiff drum solo that ends the song, he'd be a richer man. But machines can't change their minds.
The rest of Shredders steps away from the industrial dogpatches and floats in a narcotic haze, sometimes finding beauty and sometimes waiting too long to exhale. The best is "Lighting Rigg", whose jazz-guitar riffs bloom like sunshine through the gray Atlantic. "Electric Blue" also picks up that vibe and drizzles microtones upon the sea. Too bad Campitelli is too complacent to swim up to the surface, as he deadpans under deep medication, "I am what it is be reliable," in the otherwise engrossing "Reliable I". The album's weakest moment, "Gamblor", is a rather dour and cumbersome space-out that doesn't pick up until minute seven-- though extra brownie points go to the song title's Simpsons reference, a brief instance of comic relief that lightens Shredders Dub's carefully crafted claustrophobia.
