From the blurry B&W; cover shot of our man doing something as self-effacing as picking peaches beneath skeletal, blood-red text, dentist/producer Keith Hudson's 1974 solo album Flesh of My Skin, Blood of My Blood looks as if it could fit somewhere between Jandek's Nine-Thirty and Telegraph Melts in the mysterious Texan mumbler's shadowy discography. But Hudson's outsider reggae music still sounds human, even if Leroy Sibbles' thumping bass is distorted beyond recognition and Augustus Pablo is made to blow steely harp instead of plastic melodica, the results of which sound like Stevie Wonder's work on the harmonica.
This is another welcome step in Basic Replay's reconsideration of the erratic (and mostly out-of-print) discography of "The Dark Prince of Reggae." Last year, the label issued Hudson's delirious penultimate showcase Playing It Cool and Playing It Right-- here's hoping that Torch of Freedom isn't far behind. The man's catalog is notoriously diverse, and even within these 12 tracks, the erratic Hudson swerves all over the place. Opener "Hunting" is a tropical instrumental filled with the sound of rustling leaves, painfully modulated bass, Pablo's terse harmonica lines, and trickles of single-string guitar, birdcalls and rain patter, all mixed into a jungle haze.
The album's four instrumentals are less dubs than ways to allow the soupy soul of "My Nocturne" or "Blood of My Blood" to stew just a bit longer, making them taste less like roots music and more like a drugged concoction cut from the run out grooves of There's a Riot Goin' On. "Darkest Night" is an original rhythm and is a seething, hypnotic drive down the heart of darkness highway (revisited to even more devastating effect on Playing It Cool) with dissolving congas, heavily wah-wah'd guitar, and beckoning siren calls from Candi McKenzie in the opaque, humid night.
From there it's unsteady as, through the murk of the tape, Hudson cracks up on "Testing of My Faith", claiming he "can't hold back these anxieties" while lamenting aloud: "Why can't I be like any other man?" Even more telling is the amorphous croak-croon he unfurls on Woodstock hymn "I Shall Be Released". Just as Dylan and The Band scoffed at acidic, "pie in the sky" explorations during the Summer of Love, Hudson dodges simplified Rastafarian rhetoric to dig for something deeper and darker. His hands plunge into the dank earth, and much like The Basement Tapes, he pulls up eternally black roots, weird gibberish, and the worms that writhe in the mud of the shared mind.
