Passage To Hades

You can forget just how central a role Jah Wobble played in post punk pop: as Lydon’s accomplice in PiL; as the dub symphonist of the Primals’ ‘Higher Than The Sun’; as the provider of a blueprint for Madonna’s ge-henna’d Salomé dance routines by way of ‘Visions Of You’ with Sinéad and The Invaders Of The Heart.

Passage To Hades, this collaboration with free jazz exponent Evan Parker, won’t return him to the centre, but it is a heck of a hex nonetheless.

For a start, the title tune is a bagpipe drone built on a papyrus boat powered by Wobble’s patented dum-dum dub bass and Mark Sanders’ scattershot drums.

The second piece, an aptly titled sonic exorcism called ‘Giving Up The Ghost’, is closer to what we’ve come to know as free jazz. And by the time ‘Full On’ has kicked in, the dream-sequence appears to have relocated the listener to a Marrakech market via Clive Bell’s stereo goathorns. Talk about out of the frying fire and into Pan.

The fourth and last piece, ‘Finally Cracked It’, is the most linear on the album, and cries out for some of the dark artistry of its predecessors.

So, Passage To Hades trails off rather than blows itself out, but don’t let that throw you. This ain’t no Odyssey, but it is a trip.