The DUB legend is looking for new adventures in the playroom. Heat flickers over the desert, an uprooted bush blows over, a lonely rider chews on a cigar stub. These are so clichés that come to mind when a zither and a harmonica wobble through the track that Adrian Sherwood did not accidentally baptize “Spaghetti Best Western”. Here the legendary DUB producer, label operator and musician bowed to the even more legendary film composer Ennio Morricone, but-the reference to the medium-priced hotel chain in the song title indicates-not without an ironic smile.
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Sherwood, now 67 years old, exhibits the clichés without revealing it, his second solo album from 2006 was called Becoming a Cliché. He isolates the basics, reinforces them, repeats them – and gives them new life. It is the principle of the dub that he might dominate like no other – and once again masterfully demonstrated after 13 years of albump break.
As a producer and remixer, Sherwood was rather a service provider, on The Collapse of Everything he is entirely with himself, a child in the playroom who, self -forgetting, shoves colorful blocks back and forth back and forth in order to put the doll kitchen into operation, always looking for new adventures. “Battles Without Honor and Humanity” sounds when a children’s army is marching through a bubbling aquarium, “The Grand Designer” sends a James Bond theme song into space, the title piece stretches like a yoga session with flute tones and wind noise. With the album in the luggage, Sherwood will first break on a solo tour with a live band in his life. Even more adventure.
This review first appeared in the MusikExpress 09/2025.