10 Ft. Ganja Plant

This New York jam/dub collective's fifth record is packed, as usual, with homages to classic Jamaican instrumental dub and feel-good grooves. The album's strength lies in its ability to balance its love of '70s dub and present a new face of modern dub-based instrumental music. Tracks such as "Machete Strike" and "Bush Rock" use tradition as their starting point but set their GPS to points far off the beaten track. The reverb dripping off the rhythm guitar and a minor key melodica help ground the former song in a retro vibe, while the latter takes what feels like a lost dub of Israel Vibration and turns the experimental knob on the dub console up to 11. Similarly, "Too Much a Gun a Bust" is a high-grade throwback to the Channel One roots sound, while "Head Shrinker" and "The Cyclops" are a dub engineer's playthings.