You’d be forgiven for not yet being aware of New Age Doom: The pet project of a bunch of Vancouver doom-metal hippies and mainstays of the city’s indie scene (Limblifter fans of the world, unite!) generated some buzz with last year’s Himalayan Dream Techno, but they only really turned heads recently, upon revealing that they’d somehow convinced Lee “Scratch” Perry to record a prog-jazz-dub album with them; the Jamaican icon died just weeks after the announcement. The band thankfully takes full advantage of this serendipitous last act of generosity on Scratch’s part, pulling on a far broader palette of local and prestige talent than Himalayan Dream Techno did, notably including key players from David Bowie’s Blackstar band, tenor saxophonist Donny McCaslin and drummer/synth player Tim Lefebvre, whose presence lends a haunted quality to the performances. Together, on Lee “Scratch” Perry’s Guide to the Universe, New Age Doom use the dub founder’s commanding presence as a lightning rod for channeling a syncretic new type of heavy music, one that draws equally on the jagged, glacial chords of distorted guitars, the viscous, amniotic fluidity of dub, and the churning orbital dynamics of Afrofuturist jazz.
Even compared to Perry’s most far-out dub productions, Guide to the Universe instantly stands apart. The familiar one-two rhythm of reggae has been almost entirely jettisoned, replaced by a lumbering rhythmic skeleton recognizable from sky-scraping post-rock; Mono drummer Dahm Majuri Cipolla contributes both drums and gong. The group instead conjures the deep, sensual motion of Perry’s dubwork around doom metal’s throbbing low-end riffs, while the whole structure is shot through with dissonant horn solos reminiscent of classic jazz fusion and contemporary post-Dilla movements. At its best, the album constitutes a ’70s synthesis 50 years in the making—Sabbath meets electric Miles meets, well, Perry himself, who is able here to simultaneously revisit his most fertile period while breaking heretofore unexplored musical ground.
On Guide to the Universe, the famed Upsetter assumes the role of Gandalf at the court of Rohan, casting off his beige robes and emerging to reveal the cosmic depth of his soul and life purpose. Perry serves as intermittent agitator and conduit for the spirit, his characteristically impenetrable argot pared down to its barest essentials: “Be patient, be perfect, and be pure.” “If you don’t ask, you won’t get it, so ask for it.” “Brush your teeth with a toothbrush.” Any My Bloody Valentine fan will be familiar with music that reaches that kind of visceral place with the fewest chords possible, but Perry applies this logic to his poetic impulses as well.
“Fulfillment, armageddon,” Perry intones thrice on “Holy Dub,” as drum fills loop intermittently with gyroscopic Leslie speaker effects. Meanwhile, acoustic bass is layered with electric, and a trumpet solo meanders through scales in the corner of one audio channel just as a synthesized pattern does the same in the other. By matching Perry’s studio machinations with their own real-time instrumental echoes, the band members play on Perry’s oft-quoted description of the Black Ark: “The studio must be like a living thing, a life itself. The machine must be live and intelligent. Then I put my mind into the machine and the machine perform reality.” Perry always understood the value of treating machines like human beings, but on Guide to the Universe, he pairs those cybernetic aspirations with a simpler observation about society: “Life is an experiment,” he says. “The more you experiment, you make the world better for each other.” Experimentalists like Perry break down barriers over the course of their lives, creating new technological and aesthetic space; for New Age Doom to have fashioned their own style of shape-shifting experimental music to serve as a vessel for that philosophy makes for a fitting tribute to the late dub visionary.
Buy: Rough Trade
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