It was no secret that
Adrian Sherwood's celebrated experimental reggae label, On-U Sound, was in trouble in the late '90s. Suffering along with the rest of the slumping music industry, On-U was further hobbled by business practices that could most charitably be characterized as casual and by a series of aborted relationships with U.S. distributors that was eerily reminiscent of
Spinal Tap's relationship with its drummers. At one point the ever-enigmatic
Sherwood basically announced that he had no plans to release any further On-U product in the foreseeable future, and it looked as if that were all she wrote. Then, in 2002, came
Chainstore Massacre, a various-artists pastiche in the tradition of the label's
Pay It All Back series of the late '80s and early '90s -- a collection of tracks taken from albums scheduled for release in the upcoming year. And if this compilation could be taken at face value, it would prove to be quite a year indeed: There are contributions here from most of the surviving On-U stable, including
2 Badcard (aka
Carlton "Bubblers" Ogilvie, who weighs in with the very dread "Noise Polluters"), a gracefully aging
Mark Stewart (whose "Lunatics Are Taking Over the Asylum" is a rant in the classic style), and, inevitably,
Dub Syndicate (which, at the time of
Chainstore Massacre's release, meant drummer
Style Scott). Most exciting of all is a track by the
Asian Dub Foundation, which was dropped in 2001 by London and appeared to have found a new home at On-U. Not everything here is brilliant, of course -- if it were, this wouldn't be an On-U release. But it's a glorious mess in the long-established tradition of glorious messes that is this label's unique heritage. Ignore it at your peril.