A Grape Dope - Immediate Action #2
(Hefty)
I'm starting to get the feeling that if all the guitarists of
the world died, and only the drummers were left to lead bands, we would
suddenly be overrun by dub music.
John Herndon, drummer of Tortoise, Isotope 217, 5ive Style, and about a
hundred other bands, contributes the second release to Hefty Records'
Immediate Action series, a series of 12"s dedicated to releasing music
quickly in limited quantities. Herndon's contribution is under the
moniker A Grape Dope and is a live recording of his bass heavy,
dub-influenced solo music.
The bass is the main ingredient in this concoction, and it just flows.
Its sound is incredible, so full-bodied and so low it shakes your insides.
The other instruments--clicks, words, keyboards, noise, beats, electric
guitar--are only there as accents. Played in sequence, the three songs
here all kind of blend together, as the bass makes so many variations
and subtle transformations inside each song that the flow easily carries over
to the next. The music may sound like dub, but it is also obviously
influenced by jazz: the bass melody does not concentrate on carrying the
groove but rather finding it and keeping it continuously evolving; the
squiggles dance around the bass playing off of it, not just there for
decoration.
The comparison to drummer Doug Scharin's HIM project is
inevitable but unfounded. In HIM, Scharin is experimenting, unaccustomed to
dub or jazz, crafting standard songs using dub and jazz parts; Herndon just
sits back and lets the bass flow, smooth like Billy Dee and Colt 45, drawing
from his moonlighting liason as club DJ, creating simple, clean music that
will shake your car's foundation and your ass. Cruise downtown with this
blasting; you will get many stares, totally different stares than when you
were last blasting HIM. Fans of Herndon's bands should definitely find a
copy of this before they're all gone.
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