Fat Freddy's Drop Blackbird

In their home country of New Zealand, Fat Freddy's Drop have been recognized as one of the best dub reggae acts of the new millennium. It's this level of hard-earned notoriety that makes Blackbird, their third full-length, such a daring move forward. Working off of tightly-forged grooves and upstroke rhythms, the Wellington septet have crafted an album of loose, genre-meandering tracks that both embrace and ignore everything that has made them fan-favourites. On the album's nine soul-bubblers, Fat Freddy's Drop come off slicker and more mature, as tracks like "Clean the House" and "Bones" flirt with pre-Motown R&B and smooth jazz, while the instrumentation allows Dallas Tamaira's charismatic vocals to properly breathe and gestate. Even if Blackbird simply stuck to that formula, the album would have been a success, but Fat Freddy's Drop go on to add dancehall's low-end ("Russia"), jam rock's adventurousness ("Silver & Gold") and dubstep's electro-scatting ("Never Moving"). Blackbird is a triumph for Fat Freddy's Drop; it's an album that comes off as established but still explorative. (The Drop)