Rising Above Bedlam

This album is a rebirth. Jah Wobble had already made extraordinary impact with PiL and his other early 80s experiments with the likes of Holger Czukay and François Kevorkian, caused chaos, sobered up and taken time away from music. But then the post acid house wave of experimentation broke, and connecting with the likes of Andrew Weatherall and The Orb — themselves inspired by his early work — fired him up and made him the lasting mainstay of the left field that he remains 30 years on. This album has other huge musical personalities on — the formidable and multilingual Egyptian-Belgian Natacha Atlas and the mighty Sinéad O’Connor most notably — and traverses flamenco, house, beat poetry, country, industrial and a whole lot more. But it’s grounded, literally and figuratively, by Wobble’s ground-shaking dub basslines and his force of personality as he shakes off his demons, realises convincingly that “love is stronger than fear,” and finds reasons to celebrate life. It’s an intensely spiritual record, but you don’t need to be that way inclined to appreciate his earthy wisdom. If it has a fault it’s that the epochally, eternally great “Visions of You” starts off and thus overshadows the rest of the album, but the rest of the record is still glorious by most standards.