Review
Genre and Mood
Tim Love Lee made Dub Cherie out of a New Young Pony Club recording, and turned a pop band into dub: downtempo, electronic, built from space as much as from sound. The feelings named here, dreamy and hypnotic, are this page’s reading; the album’s own tags are downtempo, trip hop, lounge and analog synth, and the label he founded made its name on music that is “doped up, blissed-out or living on the margins of the acceptable.”
Song Summary
Dub Cherie is track four of Fully Bearded: 15 Years of Tummy Touch Records in Dub, the album Tim “Love” Lee released in November 2011 to mark fifteen years of his label: dubbed-out versions of Tummy Touch tracks by Groove Armada with Bryan Ferry, Tom Vek, Phenomenal Handclap Band and others. This one was previously unreleased. In the words of the album’s track notes, New Young Pony Club were “once signed to Tummy Touch as Organic Audio” and “have since taken the pop world by storm.” Which of their songs the dub is made from, the sources do not say.
Musical Breakdown
No source walks through Dub Cherie part by part, so the breakdown follows how a dub is made rather than a timeline.
Intro
Listen for what the dub lets in first and what it holds back.
Main Section
At just over five minutes, the dub has room for the producer to bring parts in and out. Notice which elements stay constant and which appear only for a moment.
Outro
A dub often ends as it began, by taking things away; listen for what is the last sound standing.
Concepts in Focus
dub began in Jamaica as a way of remixing a record by stripping it back and treating what is left with echo and reverb. Every track on Fully Bearded is a dub in that sense, a remix built from the original’s parts rather than a new song.
In dub, mixing becomes performance. Tim Love Lee made the album’s sounds in his Brooklyn studio “from raw audio tracks using a heavily modified vintage radio broadcasting mixing board and a handful of esoteric effects units.” The desk is the instrument: what he raises, drops and sends into the effects is the music.
Artistic Context
Tim “Love” Lee has been DJing since 1988 and releasing his own music since 1990, and founded Tummy Touch in 1996; the label has had offices in London and New York and launched Groove Armada, whose dub-soaked Groove Armada – Superstylin’ shows the family taste, and Tom Vek. New Young Pony Club, led by Tahita Bulmer and Andy Spence, took Ice Cream to number 40 in the UK in 2007.
Impact and Reception
Silent Radio called Fully Bearded “an excellently produced and lovingly curated dub album” and its maker “a pioneer of electronic, dance, and downtempo trip-hop music.” Dub Cherie is its pop band heard from the inside out. Listen on good speakers, with the lights low.
