In 1973, Perry built a backyard studio in Kingston, naming it the Black Ark. In 1968, he formed his own label, Upsetter Records. His first major single, People Funny Boy - a jibe at Gibbs - was praised for its innovative use of a crying baby recording, an early use of a sample. Perry broke ranks with Dodd over personal and financial conflicts, moving to Joe Gibbs's Amalgamated Records before also falling out with Gibbs. He began selling records for Clement Coxsone Dodd's sound system in the late 1950s, while also cultivating his own recording career.
"This has proved eternally useful to me." Through dominoes I practised my mind and learned to read the minds of others." But Rainford marks a welcome return for an artist who for far too long had been rendered all but invisible behind his abstruse wit, esoteric demeanor, and all those mirrors."When I left school there was nothing to do except field work. It’s also possible that Perry hasn’t fallen quite as far in the popular imagination as Cash had his groundbreaking early work casts a long shadow that his more unfocused later years have’t dimmed. The songwriting is too inconsistent, and there are too many moments of musical flab. Rainford is unlikely to rejuvenate Lee “Scratch” Perry’s career in the way American Recordings did for Johnny Cash. The brilliance of “African Starship” lies in the interplay between the song’s rusting metallic skank and Perry’s sky-gazing humanity, while Perry’s melodic vocal is not enough to rescue the rather drab production on “Run Evil Spirit,” a song that outstays its welcome two minutes in. “Cricket on the Moon” combines classic reggae lurch with an occasional digital stutter “Let It Rain” offsets a dancehall beat with a string section that is slurred yet elegant and “Makumba Rock” introduces Brazilian instrumentation to a rolling bassline.įor all Sherwood’s musical nous, though, the strength of the album is in collaboration, with Perry’s iconic vocal tone-a mixture of phlegmy rasp, biblical command, and childish wonder-giving life to Sherwood’s lolloping grooves, much as Johnny Cash’s funereal baritone anchored Rick Rubin’s minimalist production on American Recordings. Rainford is helped along by the instinctive production of longtime Perry collaborator and British dub pioneer Adrian Sherwood, whose work here balances classic reggae tropes-off-beat guitar chops, cavernous bass lines, and one-drop drums-with modern production touches and idiosyncratic effects, doing much of the melodic lifting along the way. Perry’s vocal may not be particularly melodic, but there is something profoundly moving about hearing a musical legend who often seems at odds with the modern world relate tales of Bob Marley and his mythical Black Ark studio in a tone of guttural gravitas, while backing vocals lilt around him in a tender embrace.
On “Autobiography of the Upsetter,” Perry plays things relatively straight, narrating his life story from childhood in 1930s Jamaica to his burgeoning musical career, only occasionally veering into the kind of free-associative babble that litters his more recent work. You can best hear this newfound clarity on album standout “Autobiography of the Upsetter.” While recent Perry tracks, like Orb collaboration “Ball of Fire,” could be a lot of fun, you’d be hard pressed to divine what his rambling vocal lines were actually about. And if Rainford, Perry’s new album, isn’t quite the Cash-esque late-period renaissance that producer Adrian Sherwood has compared it to, it is at least somewhere in the same ballpark, thanks to the album’s sympathetic contemporary production and personal appeal. In this, Perry resembles a pre- American Recordings Johnny Cash, another artist whose continued output in the 1980s did little good for his reputation.
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