Lee “Scratch” Perry, Reggae’s dub emperor and all-round sound magician died in 2021, after a 60-odd year career that is rumoured to have produced something in the realm of 2,000 albums and numerous additional tracks. So, perhaps it isn’t such a surprise that there have been a rash of releases in the last couple of years claiming to be Scratch’s last recordings.
In fact, to the excellent collaboration with New Age Doom, Lee “Scratch” Perry’s Guide to the Universe and the solo King Perry, we can now add this album with Youth, Killing Joke’s bassist, producer and co-creator with the likes of Paul McCartney, the Orb and many others. However, given that Perry supposedly began work on this album “in the Third Dimension – and oversaw its completion from an unquantifiable one”, it’s moot whether he knew much about his involvement in Spaceship to Mars.
Perry and Youth aren’t the only artists involved with Spaceship to Mars either. Carroll Thompson, the Queen of Lovers Rock, provides melodic backing vocals on the summery “Love Sunshine Peace” and Boy George lends his pipes to the sublime heavy dub of “The Lizard”. Both of which have Perry rambling his stream of consciousness proclamations throughout. That said, other fine collaborations include Holly Cook on the mellow “Butterfly Sky” and Amy Adams on “Love is War”.
After the first side of this disc, however, things start running out of steam, with “Bulldozer Dub” and the title track sounding more like fairly ordinary Orb tracks and “Iron Shirt” not really adding anything new to Max Romeo and the Upsetters’ classic “Chase the Devil”. Nevertheless, if you are a fan of deep basslines and have got room in your life for the additional album of dub remixes, there’s much here for our weed-smoking brethren and anyone else who wants to maintain the sunshine, as autumn begins to bear down on us.
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