Giant Panda leads the way of the new reggae
Sound Check
The Buffalo News
01.22.10
By Jeff Miers
When Bob Marley wrote “Roots Rock Reggae” and “Punky Reggae Party,” he couldn’t have fully foreseen the cross-pollination that would so utterly transform the music he had helped to pioneer and the broader pop culture that would embrace it.
At the end of the 1970s, Marley was watching as the “punks” embraced reggae and its offshoot, dub, employing it as a basis for their own brand of working class art-rock, and crystallizing it with such timeless platters as the Clash’s “Sandinista!“ and the nascent efforts of Public Image Ltd. Marley offered his bemused approval. After all, anything was better than Eric Clapton’s white-bread take on “I Shot the Sheriff,” wasn’t it?
Thirty years on, and reggae is no less a cultural force than it was when Marley still existed in the corporeal sense. Interestingly, that influence has gone underground to do its most important work, while up on the far less interesting surface, the rhythmic sway of that music has been dumbed-down and sublimated by contemporary dance pop. (Same as it ever was.) If you want to hear where dub and reggae are wreaking the most havoc, don’t bother turning on the radio or scanning the Top 40. Head to a club where a DJ is spinning “dubstep,” the latest in a long line of hybridizations melding Jamaican rhythm to urban electronic music.
Or go to a concert by a jam band like Umphrey’s McGee, which has managed to sneak dub and reggae into its progrock- jam stew. “Authentic” reggae bands exist, of course, particularly in Jamaica, or on the cover band circuit. You can hear fantastic musicians in Buffalo — from Neville Francis to Tom Fenton — offering their takes on reggae around town on a regular basis, too.
On Thursday, you can head to Nietzsche’s (248 Allen St.) to take in an ensemble that is, if not leading the charge, then certainly offering an interesting twist on contemporary reggae. Giant Panda Guerilla Dub Squad was born in Rochester about a decade back. There are no Jamaicans in the band. No DJ is spinning dub-step while kids in baseball caps do the white guy dance.
No, the Pandas, as the band is known to a rapidly expanding fan base, plays with the thrill of transgression, melding dub and reggae to their own compositions, adding improvisational elements, and coming up with something that blends the spaciousness of art-rock with the steady skank of Jamaican music and the tribal thump of the jam band.
The Pandas aren’t the only outfit engaging in such activity. There’s Bedouin Soundclash, Slightly Stoopid, Badfish, John Brown’s Body, oldies but goodies like Bad Brains and Fishbone, Long Beach Dub Allstars, Matisyahu, Rac, Asian Dub Foundation, Illscarlett, STS9, and dozens more, all offering their own idiosyncratic take on reggae, dub and various fusions of them.
All of these bands and artists are well worth checking out, but Giant Panda Guerilla Dub Squad has something all its own, and the core of that lies in the band’s ability to reclaim dub and reggae rhythms from electronic music, completing the circle by “rehumanizing” the music.
So the Pandas are all about the live performance, the real-time interplay between musicians that lends fire to their studio recordings but comes front and center when the band is on stage. Witness the band’s new album, “Live Up!,” an in-concert document tracked largely during the always- touring band’s shows in Colorado and California over the past 18 months. It’s more manifesto than mere album, actually. Within its grooves is readily apparent the mash-up of styles and the overriding belief system that informs that mash-up.
Stoner metaphysics, a cynic might say, but so what? “Spiritual” underpinnings might be difficult to quantify in music of a secular variety, but listen to “Live Up’s” “Blacktoke,” and try to deny the admittedly abstract belief system informing it. There’s something going on there that isn’t merely the math of chord changes and subdivided measurements of time.
“ ‘Live Up!’ is to live positive,” writes the band in the album’s liner notes. “It is to not let the past take you down and to glide with positive force toward the future. It is to live life every day to the maximum potential for the benefit of yourself and everything around you.” Yeah, mon. ’Tis so.
Maybe you think this is all a lot of hooey. And maybe it is. Still, Giant Panda Guerilla Dub Squad represents something exciting on the modern musical landscape. It’s that thrilling moment, pregnant with possibility, where the technological and the tribal meet. Music as ritual? I’ll have a little of that, please.
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