Hear His Name Spoken In Every Room

Spoon “The Devil & Mr. Jones” (Adrian Sherwood Reconstruction)

The only thing that’s surprising to me about Spoon having Adrian Sherwood create a dub version of their most recent album Lucifer on the Sofa is that it’s taken this long for Spoon to actually have a dub version of any thing. You can hear the influence of dub on their studio work going back to Kill the Moonlight, to the point that the final mix some songs in their catalog sounds like a dub version of a more normal rock recording. Sherwood, one of the great icons of dub, does some great work with Spoon’s raw material and in the case of “On the Radio” and “The Devil and Mr. Jones” pushes the songs to become something much better than on the original record. The latter song takes on an entirely different character with Sherwood at the boards, unlocking some ska vibes that were only lurking beneath the surface of the original arrangement. There’s a lot of heavy reverb and psychedelic warping in the mix but the song is pretty much intact, even if Britt Daniel’s voice often gets abstracted to the point of pure sound. It works as a Spoon song, it works as dub – pretty much the ideal for a remix.

Buy it from Bandcamp.