Deadline - Down By Law

Fourth World electro & dub tracks by an all-stars cast (Manu Dibango, Jaco Pastorius, Phillip Wilson, etc.) led by Bill Laswell. A stone-cold classic.

Deadline's Down By Law is in no way a rare or expensive record. You can still find it in cheap bins at older shops and it seems to me that it has always been a despised by owner of aforementioned record stores. As far as I remembered, I always loved it, and today, I come back to it much more often than, say, Zazou Bikaye's recordings of the same vein.

There's something utterly minimal and a deadly precision that makes it stand out among the (not so many) releases in that Fourth World / Electro field, especially on tracks like Boat Peoples, Baliphone Dub or Gammatron. It's not trying to be excessively futuristic or funky, doing very little more than sounding like the place and the time it was recorded in: NYC in the mid-1980's, that is to say the cruel center of the Free World. And it's just as abstract, as pessimistic and clairvoyant as it should be. An attitude reflected by Futura 2000's perfect artwork.

Tracklist

1. Afro Beat
2. Boat Peoples
3. Baliphone Dub
4. Makossa Rock
5. Gammatron
6. Doo Root