Sly & Robbie Return with “Red Hills Road”
The dynamic duo of Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare started their careers together in the early 1970s in Kingston. Now, the legendary reggae rhythm section has dropped a new album called Red Hills Road that’s named after the neighborhood where they cut their teeth. It’s also where most of their work from the past decade has been produced.
The 13-song instrumental album pushes beyond the Dancehall and reggae they’re known for and experiments with EDM. Shakespeare tells the Jamaica Gleaner that Red Hills Road has “a raw sound, nothing too over produced or complicated.”
Dunbar goes into further detail, saying “I have a love for instrumentals, so we’ve been doing just that, and especially on a dancehall beat. There were lots of hit ska and rocksteady instrumentals, but in the dancehall era, not so many. When I listen to dancehall, there’s nothing exciting happening. So I started to search for something different that people can listen to. I even go back to kumina and mento on tracks like ‘Linstead Market’ and ‘Coronation Market.’”
Check out the track “Haul & Pull Up”:
Red Hills Road is available now on Bandcamp, iTunes, and Amazon MP3.
Red Hills Road Track List:
- Yaw Yaw Yippee
- Mad Piano
- Linstead Market
- Belly Dancer
- Sweet Dub
- So Far Away
- When Love is New
- Haul & Pull Up
- Santa Barbara
- El Bang Bang
- Beat Box
- Two Thirty
- Coronation Market
Almost unlistenable.