Sydney-based dub duo Assemblage Point had the rather unique pleasure of having their preceding Cent’nal Dub single win the “Best Experimental Song’ category in last year’ Global Marijuana Music Awards, and this follow-up 12†Fire! on their own UM Records label represents the first taste of their upcoming debut album, expected in June 2008. On the A-side of this 12â€, “Fire!’ shows a considerable stylistic shift away from the spliffed-out echo-chamber drenched excursions of Assemblage Point’s previous releases, with Oz-hiphop vocals taking the forefront as moody horn samples blare in the background over a vast rolling bed of bhangra-meets-dancehall percussion, handclaps and whirring turntablist noise – the end result being not entirely dissimilar to the likes of It Crawled From The Sea-era Underlapper given considerably more of a Black Ark-ian twist. On the flip, “Broken Smile’ sees unhinged lunatic vocals drifting beneath a menacing backdrop of buzzing analogue synth bass, clattering hiphop breaks and looped samples of whistling, and while the occasional sense of overall directionlessness sets in at points, it’s more than made up for by the judicious deployment of sampled jazz-noir horns, which build into a ferocious wall of noise as the track nears its end. The Soundsbent remix of “Cent’nal Dub’ meanwhile certainly lives up to its title, pitching the original’ swaggering dub-reggae rhythms right down to a fugged-out crawl while sending the snares scattering through all manner of dub-delay FX. Assemblage Point certainly manage to hit more than a few interesting buttons with this latest 12â€, but more attention to the final mix and mastering here would have yielded a stronger end result.
Chris Downton
