Since its birth, reggae has regularly reclaimed the standards of a musical genre. While soul, blues and jazz are the most obvious relatives, rock is less represented in the broad range of reggae covers. The Easy Star label and its musicians offer a reinterpretation of Pink Floyd's cult "Dark Side Of The Moon", cleverly renamed "Dub Side Of The Moon". But there is no need to know the original work to appreciate the label's work. Already released in 2003, it is now reissued and benefits from French distribution worthy of its quality.
This ambitious project of a reggae reworking of a rock classic (touching up such a respected album was a double-edged sword) is ultimately not so surprising. For what Pink Floyd were doing with "Dark Side Of The Moon" in 1973 is the same as what Lee Perry and King Tubby were doing with their tapes: a quest for new sounds, for new musical structures, in short, a dive into a new sonic world. Pink Floyd, close to dub? Assuredly. Their psychedelic rock suits dub sonorities perfectly, and the skank fits neatly onto the long, melancholy tableaux broken up by rhythmic surges on which one recognises artists such as Ranking Joe, Frankie Paul and the Meditations.
One listens with a mixture of amusement and enthusiasm to this faithful and precise rewrite, which pulls off the feat of keeping the evocative power of the original album while reshaping it. And with plenty of nods along the way: one smiles on hearing Money and its famous introduction with the cash register, here replaced by the sound of a chalice. The finest pieces are Time with Ranking Joe, The Great Gig In The Sky and Brain Damage. A few disappointments all the same: Us And Them, already a little limp on the original, gains little from passing under the syncopation of reggae. But apart from the tiring On The Run and its jungle rhythm, "Dub Side Of The Moon" is the result of a very fine job of reappropriating Pink Floyd's work. And it bears witness to reggae's versatility and its ability to absorb the components of other musics.
