Another Sound is Dying

Given that their new album opens with a guitar riff that could melt lead - a theme, incidentally, that extends throughout Another Sound Is Dying - you'd be forgiven for wondering what connects Brookyln's Dub Trio to the nearly 40-year-old Jamaican style that makes up half their name. The answer, you'll find, comes just minutes later, as the riffs, riddims and raw power at the core of Dub Trio's sound get chopped apart, bounced across speaker channels and charged with subsonic frequencies. This is dub as mixing-board art form, not as literal genre exercise, and it's absolutely fugging massive.

Recorded in a week at New Hampshire's Studio Metronome, and reconfigured in an additional week at Studio G in Brooklyn, Another Sound Is Dying finds Dub Trio drummer Joe Tomino, bassist Stu Brooks and guitarist D.P. Holmes again working with producer/engineer/honorary fourth member Joel Hamilton on tunes that simultaneously embrace metal, hip-hop, punk and reggae while pushing all of the above into dazzlingly unfamiliar areas. From the dramatic, shoegaze-style post-metal of "Respite" and the straightforward roots-reggae nods in "Mortar Dub," to the contrapuntal, lid-peeling violence of the closing track, "Funishment," the album showcases Dub Trio's chops and vocabulary (all three members are also seasoned session players) as much as it finds them swinging, grooving and pummeling with wrecking-ball force.