The Pop Group

★★★ Y In Dub

MUTE. CD/DL

Post-punk classic fearlessly deconstructed by Dennis Bovell MBE. On July 31, 2021, maverick UK reggae linchpin Bovell premiered a live-mix assault on punk-funk pioneers The Pop Group’s Y as part of Coventry’s City Of Culture celebrations. As 2019’s 40th anniversary reissue of the album flagged up, the original nine Bovell-produced tracks were quite out-there to begin with, and this studio revision is anything but a conventional head-nodding dub experience. The spectral opening take on Thief Of Fire focuses on Simon Underwood’s bass line, albeit an unsettlingly spidery meander on the higher strings, while We Are Time simply acquires echo and delay around its propulsive groove’s fringes. Aside from those two catchier raw materials, the remainder are abstractions of the already abstract: Blood Money has its beat decelerated to a sub16rpm trudge, while Words Disobey Me foregrounds gnarly skronk. Bonus tilts at She Is Beyond Good And Evil (the single!) and 3:38 perform even more ruthless disassembly, making Y In Dub strictly for fans of the ‘difficult’.