Techno Party

by Rick AndersonThere are a couple of reasons to be leery of this album, one of them bad and one of them good. The bad reason is the similarity of its title to an earlier, generally execrated Perry album called Technomajikal. Don't be fooled -- this really is a reggae album, and with Mad Professor and Mafia & Fluxy sharing the riddim-creating duties, listeners can be sure that it's well-filled with bottomless modern reggae grooves. The second, more legitimate reason for regarding this album with suspicion is the fact that Perry -- never, shall we say, the most stable personality to begin with -- simply hasn't done much worth listening to in recent years, not compared to his output during the brilliant Black Ark period. But Mad Professor coaxes some fine, if typically unhinged, performances out of Scratch on this album. "No Dreads" revisits a classic Upsetters rhythm while Scratch babbles winningly above it; "This Old Man" takes the nursery rhyme through a drum'n'bass wringer while Perry rails against Satan; "Crooks in the Business" and "Daddy Puff" find him issuing another in an ongoing litany of warnings to those who would pirate his rhythms and steal his money, accompanied by, respectively, spare dancehall and roots beats. The days of definitive Perry material may be long past, but this one is definitely worth picking up.