- Even in 2008 when he had his commercial breakthrough; Kevin Martin, aka The Bug, talked about his art as “music for the end times” and a “soundtrack for the coming apocalypse”.
So it makes sense that The Bug would be back in 2021 with his first new music in 7 years – just in time for our current setting of war, pandemic, and environmental disaster. Fittingly, the album is called Fire, and is released into a world where news outlets literally carry interactive maps of wildfires raging across the globe.
The album intro, featuring poet Roger Robinson, is one of the bleakest pictures of the future you could possibly imagine – almost comical in its depiction of a future “after the fourth year of being cooped up... the only way we could see our families would be through the square screens... hello loneliness, goodbye compassion... People were no longer arrested for not being vaccinated, now they were just terminated.”
It is followed by an intense blast of bass noise introducing Pressure. It’s a track that recalls The Bug’s classic track Skeng in multiple ways – similar slow and heavy dancehall production, and rapper Flowdan is back with more black humour in the vein of opening line “They gonna run outta town when we apply pressure / Babylon time bomb send for the stretcher”. It’s actually probably a more intense track even than Skeng was – a sign that Kevin Martin is not mellowing out three decades into making electronic music.
Flowdan makes a few appearances, one of ten guest vocalists across the fourteen tracks. The best moments are when Martin pushes the limits of how slow and heavy it is possible to get. Vexed featuring Moor Mother is a monster of minimal dancehall and probably the highlight of the album. Most of the songs are rough variations on a theme of heavy slow riddims, shards of harsh noise, and an MC doing their best doomsday street preacher impression. The song titles tell their own story, as heavy and minimal as the tunes – Demon, Clash, War, Bomb.
No doubt the album would be on another level when experienced live on The Bug’s legendary giant sound system. Though let’s face it, in a real apocalypse that would be low on our to do list.
It’s up to Roger Robinson, who returns for final track The Missing, to link us back to real life tragedy and injustice. His poem here is inspired by the 72 people killed by the negligence of property developers in London’s Grenfell Tower fire of 2017 - “They are the city of the missing, we now the city of the stayed.”
That’s the thing about disaster – it’s not always cinematic. TS Eliot famously said “this is how the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper”. It may yet be the silent and invisible carbon dioxide emissions of billions of people busy in their day to day lives that brings about our demise, rather than the dramatic scenes of apocalyptic prophecy.
But back to Fire – which, whether it manages to appropriately soundtrack our current zeitgeist or not, is another brilliant collection of hardcore dub. Let’s just hope our dystopian experience turns out as fun as listening to The Bug’s sonic rendition of it.
- Andy Paine.