Music reviews. CD reviews. Critically hip!

In the late 1960s a group named Iron Butterfly released an album titled IN-A-GADDA-DA-VIDA. On the vinyl version the title track was something like 16 minutes long and took up one side of the disc. It featured a extended (very extended) instrumental break which included a drum solo that seemed to go on forever. If you listened to that boy through headphones, it sounded as if the drums were floating right through your head. And yeah, a lot of things are mixed like that now, but man, listening to that, back then, for the first time, we felt like we were on the brink of something. We didn't know what, but it was something.

I haven't had that feeling duplicated (other than for a carnal adventure in the early 1980s, but now ain't the time) until recently, when I was driving through some fog the other night and slipped Adrian Sherwood's NEVER TRUST A HIPPY into the car stereo. Another brink has been reached, and, in this case, conquered. Admittedly, I shouldn't have been surprised. Sherwood has done some work with Lee "Scratch" Perry (getting an olfactory, uh, cannabis flashback when listening to one of his discs is not unusual) and Nine Inch Nails so it's not exactly like I was expecting Burt Bacharach or something. 

On the other hand, RealWorld is a division of Narada, which is a grownup label, for godssake. How far out could it be? Well, as it turned out, pretty far out. It was like listening to IN-A-GADDA-DA-VIDA composed by aliens who hear out of the back of their lips. Or something.

Sherwood describes this disc (incredibly enough, his debut, after all this time) as being "sci-fi world dancehall...dub-wise!" And he's not engaging in hyperbole here. If "Star Wars" was an X-rated movie, something from NEVER TRUST A HIPPY would be playing during the bar scene, maybe "No Dog Jazz," while a hooker with strategically-placed canines and incisors would be attempting to seduce Hans Solo. But this isn't movie soundtrack material, and it's too different, too original, to be on something as mundane as a car commercial. No; take "Hari Up Hari"; you've got Arabic calls to prayer over drum and bass trance lines and trippy keyboards, all of it impeccably mixed so that nothing gets in the way of anything else. You still here something different every time you listen to it, however. In the past two weeks it's probably been my most listened to disc. The third eye I'm growing in the middle of my forehead tells me so.

There's really not a bad moment on here. I should state that more positively; NEVER TRUST A HIPPY is filled, jammed to bursting, with great moments. "Haunted By Your Love" is an illustrative track, filled with samples of third world chants, drum and bass loops, and rhythm tracks, sounding for all the world like a musical Rosetta Stone, bringing together music past, present and future and creating a tableau that makes sense of and connects it all.

"X-Planation" begins with an intro that wouldn't sound out of place on a Herbie Hancock track ---in fact there's a futuristic jazz feel all the way through NEVER TRUST A HIPPY, that loops its way all the way through the track, running over and under some middle eastern rhythms and science fiction samples, making the whole thing sound like it was recorded in a Kashmirian Chuck E. Cheese where dad has lost the kids.

NEVER TRUST A HIPPY might well be the Sergeant Pepper of the dance genre. This is a disc, and producer, who is sure to endure, and who will continue to inspire producers, directly and indirectly, for years. Indispensable.