Asian Dub Foundation - Community Music (FFRR)

Releasedate: Mon 20.March 2000

ADF's third album, following the Mercury Prize-nominated "Rafi's Revenge". They've recently endorsed The Naz Foundation, an organisation dedicated to gay rights in the Asian Community.

When the annals of rock are written, there'll be a chapter on Britpop's Adidas-clad aesthetics - when deviating from "classic" songforms and writing lyrics with discernible subject matter were crimes on the level of being in Menswear.

Now we know different. Even Oasis claim more diverse inspiration and actual thought about their lyrics. ADF were putting such ideas into practice when everybody else was buying scooters and pretending to like The Small Faces. Like all good revolutionaries, history will absolve them.

With an album named for the community centre where the band met, it's unsurprising that, on the face of it, nothing much has changed since "Rafi's Revenge". We still have Chandrasonic's PiL-flavoured guitar abuse. The foundations still reverberate to Dr Das' dub dynamics, while Deedar's ragga MCing and militant lyrics about social justice and global capitalism echo through the mix.

But debunking the idea that ADF are a group best appraised for their extra-musical agenda, the songs have got better. There's greater variation here than last time. "Taa Deem" uses the voice of the late Pakistani devotional singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan in an evocation of power and restraint, while the eight minutes-plus instrumental dub "Scaling New Heights" is a brooding conclusion inbetween Primal Scream's "Vanishing Point" and The Orb.

Compared to the bomber assault of the Scream's "XTRMNTR" this is a stealthier assault on globalised mono-culture.

You've got to hand it to a band that narkily responded, when certain parts of the media made fawning "dub-Clash with breakbeats"-type statements, "We oppose lazy journalism that compares us to the Clash." That'll mean more revised history then.

Ian Harrison, Select