Mark Stewart
Edit
Whereas 2007 was the year that the rest of us got a chance to finally make legal our ownership of Stewart's must-own and perennial out of print bootleg Pop Group classic, their Y debut album, 2008 was the year where Mark dropped his first album of new material in 12 years. And while the On U Sound mastered by Adrian Sherwood, the sound that became Stewart's home after the 1981 disintegration of the Pop Group, completely infects this years release, there's something else going on here as well. Whether it's due to his off and on experiences in the studio producing or remixing groups like Nine Inch Nails, Tricky, Massive Attack and Primal Scream, Edit stands with both feet firmly printed in the aggro-reggae category--but it's heart belongs to those 90's days when it looked like MTV was going to make superstars out of the Crystal Method and Prodigy's Keith Flint. It only sounds like those groups--Crystal Method especially--in brief portions of songs, where you can hear the simplified melody of that heavy, shake the earth kind of techno lurking underneath the skyscrapers of dub bass that surround them. Underneath the songs--past the point where Mark's yowling vocals live, past the places where the boom-cluck-boom of a weirdly perfect cover of the Yardbird's "Mr. You're A Better Man Than I" live, there it is: that abandoned, unloved genre of frat house exercise electronica, the stuff that so many pull-ups and fist fights were made of. While Stewart's weird manipulation of the material couldn't be more obvious--at one point, he clearly begins remixing a song from the beginning, as if to tell prospective dj's "don't waste your time, I know what you're thinking"--the guy has proven over the years that he truly can take his multiple influences--the industrial sound he helped create, the dub that went on to meet the -step, the machine-driven hip-hop production style so loved by the avant-garde--and use them in service of his adopted reggae home. Ably supported by Sherwood, Keith LeBlanc on drums and female vocals from Denise Sherwood and Samia Farah, Edit is the sort of album that, after constructing a foundation of big-beat sound, layers the rest with funk, acid-jazz--hell, there's even that usually-terrible electroclash kind of thing going on. It's a fuzzed out mix of all kinds of stuff--which makes it a lot like Mark Stewart albums--but it sounds like something more than one person was involved in the recording--which makes it nothing like a Mark Stewart album.
Mark Stewart claims to have spent the last twelve years drinking and hanging out with his friends, and his work output--dropping the occasional mix, producing the occasional track, or emailing record labels until they agree to put out best-of compilations--seems to bear out a man who is content to let his "critics and producer" acclaim be his legacy. The credit for popularizing--if you can call what On U did "popular"--will always be directed in Adrian Sherwood's direction. At the same time, Edit is the best album of Mark Stewart's career, and it stands alongside the strongest of the Pop Group's as well--and while it's tempting to give an older artist the accolades that may seem to have been denied them in their youth, the simple truth is that this--this album right here, and this year right now--this is the album that some of us have been waiting for Mark Stewart to create. And while it shouldn't be recieved as a swan song or curtain call, if that's what it turns out to be?
That'll be just fine.
-Tucker Stone, 2008
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