The Answer Is In The Beat

Congo Natty: Jungle Revolution (Big Dada, 2013)

July 4, 2013 at 12:15 am | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

Congo Natty is one of the original junglists, starting his career in the late ’80s making ragga hip-hop and hip-house as Rebel MC, then playing a big part in creating the jungle genre, releasing hundreds of 12″s under several pseudonyms including Conquering Lion, Lion Of Judah, Tribe Of Issachar, and X Project. He’s truly an artist that sticks to his vision, not just in his unwavering devotion to Rastafarianism, but also by being fiercely independent and releasing most of his music on his own Congo Natty label, and associated labels. Which makes this album a bit of a surprise, not just because there haven’t been any Congo Natty releases in about 7 years (unless Discogs is incorrect or I’m reading it wrong), but because he’s releasing a collaboration-heavy, highly produced album on a big label (Ninja Tune sublabel Big Dada). His older 12″s were more lo-fi, seemingly bashed out, pressed to dubplate and released. This album contains 10 tracks featuring several well-known ragga MCs (“UK Allstars” alone features General Levy, Tippa Irie, Top Cat, Tenor Fly and Daddy Freddy), plus live guitar, horns, bass, etc. Plus Adrian Sherwood mixed it! As far as the songs, lyrically there’s not too much that will surprise anyone familiar with reggae or dancehall, and especially ragga-jungle. Lots of burning babylon, lots of bumbaclaat, lots of talk about revolution. The tracks are mostly uptempo jungle/drum’n’bass, with plenty of chopped up breaks but generally a cleaner, more produced sound common to modern drum’n’bass, as opposed to the grimy lo-fi sound of the genre’s early days. A few songs (“Revolution”, “Nu Beginningz”, “London Dungeons” which obviously has nothing to do with the Misfits, “Micro Chip (Say No)”) dip into lower dubstep-ish tempos. Not that I’m accusing a pioneer of latching onto a current trend, but it definitely sounds closer to what’s happening now than what he was doing 20 years ago. It’s definitely closer to dubstep than classic dub. But even saying that, it manages to sound more genuine than trendy. The vocals do get a little annoying and the lyrics to get a bit cliche-heavy for this genre, but there’s some cool moments. “Jah Warriors” starts by predictably sampling The Warriors, a film I’ve heard sampled, referenced and parodied so many times that I don’t ever need to actually watch the film, but it goes into some breakbeats that are closer to early ’90s breakbeat hardcore than what most drum’n’bass producers are doing now, and goes into some really hard smashing breaks later on, and I’m always in favor of that. As with most current reggae, there’s a lot of autotune on a couple tracks (“Jungle Is I And I”, “Micro Chip (Say No)” which also has children’s voices chanting “Jah, Rastafari”). A decent album, but definitely has the air of a crossover LP. The stuff this guy was doing in the early to mid ’90s still packs much more of a punch than this album.