Crooklyn Dub Outernational presents: Certified Dope Vol. 3 - Escape from New York

Yes Yes... After much waiting on both sides of the Atlantic, the Wordsound Eye was finally able to drop the third installment of the seminal Crooklyn Dub imprint just before the millennium. The album is subtitled 'Escape from New York' after the Wordsound crews exodus from the Big Apple. Repelled by the mass influx of the bourgoise loft-living professional into Brooklyn, they escaped and established links with their Illbient Dub cousins across the world to form the Crooklyn Dub Outernational. OK, but what about the music? After two classic predecessors, the question on many minds was whether WS could do it again and avoid making a less-than-divine album. Answer is "Hell Yeah" of course. No matter how cool you think your music is, no matter how much you think you know about hip hop or dub or fresh original music, you know deep down that there's always one artist, one label, one compilation series, that will constantly have you saying "What the hell is this? This is some next level stuff!" And Crooklyn Dub keep it smokin' with this release.

I got this a few days before the millenium and it has never left my CD player. Like all WS music, it can be appreciated on so many levels, and you'll find yourself coming back to again and again only to unearth new treasures for your spirit to skank to. 'Open the Gates' by Blood is pure molten gold, Roots Control give us more dopeness but sound very different stylsitically to their usual output, Laswell is Laswell and is to be revered as such, but interestingly his sometime studio-engineer Layng Martine contributes probably the single-most beautiful track with 'Over the Half World'... Nu Seekas track is a slight disappointment for those who thought his 'No Apparition' contribution on C. Dub Vol 2 was the most interesting direction taken in sound for ages. Sloteks 'Dusk Till Dawn' will straight scare you and blow your speakers, but also blow up the dancefloor (trust me I tried) and of course the prolific one, Spectre, takes out all pretentious fakers with the classic 'My Dub Weighs a Ton'. It doesn't get much better than this, but if you haven't got Vols 1and 2 then buy them first.

O, 02 April 2004