The Long Beach Dub Allstars, formed from the ashes of mid-'90s radio favorites Sublime, kept a weed-scented, standing-room-only crowd on its feet for almost two hours during their recent show at Towson's Recher Theatre. Although the Recher is one of the best-sounding and generally nicest concert venues in the Baltimore/D.C. area, the Allstars' energetic mix of musical styles - from lazy reggae to raging punk rock - made me wonder how much better the show would have been in an open-air venue - like, say, our own Beach. (Y'know, that big patch of grass in front of the library.)
As evidenced on their new CD, Wonders of the World (DreamWorks), the quality that makes the Allstars ideal Beach music is the band's simultaneous blessing and curse: while their best moments demand space to jump around, much of their material works best as background music. The mellow but meandering dub-reggae grooves on Wonders are ideal for bobbing your head along with as you sip your drink and talk to your friends, but don't really hold up to repeated listening.
Sublime singer Brad Nowell's 1996 heroin overdose still haunts the Allstars, and not just because they wouldn't have formed without it. Roughly half of the band's live set was made up of vintage Sublime tracks (such as "Badfish" and "Right Back") and Subliminal covers (from the Grateful Dead's "Scarlet Begonias" to Bad Religion's "We're Only Gonna Die"), and while their reliance on "oldies" won over the mostly college-aged Recher crowd, it also spotlighted the relative weakness of the Allstars' newer songs.
Granted, Wonders of the World and 1999's Right Back have more to do with groove-oriented reggae than the pop-savvy Sublime ever did - and there are few better ways to get a crowd on its feet and on your side than leading an audience sing-along of "Santeria" - but you'd think after two albums, Sublime survivors Bud Gaugh and Eric Wilson wouldn't feel the need to rely so heavily on their old band's material (let alone include an eerie Nowell sample on "Sunny Hours"). But considering that so many of the usual Recher headliners are cover bands, the Allstars' Sublime dependence seemed almost fitting. Frontman Opie Ortiz - formerly Sublime's tattoo artist - managed a convincing Brad Nowell imitation throughout the show, while sax player Tim Wu duplicated his solo on Sublime's '96 hit "Doin' Time." As long as you're going to hear a cover band, why not have the original musicians, right?
Fortunately for their live audience, if not for their commercial future, the eight Allstars only played a few of Wonders' 17 tracks at their Recher show. "Sunny Hours," the current single, sounds enough like Sublime's hit "What I Got" that it's doing fairly well on "alternative" radio, although the Sublime-led wave of Southern California ska-pop bands has largely disappeared from the airwaves. (Sugar Ray, anyone?) It got the strongest crowd response of any "new" songs at the show; laid-back dub excursions like "Luke" and "Life Goes On" (dedicated to the victims of the terrorist attacks) went over less well. One of the album's weaker tracks, a roaring SoCal punk number called "Every Mother's Son," spawned a predictably ferocious mosh pit, but it was the exception rather than the rule.
Although the Allstars excel at the sort of mellow jams that define most Recher headliners, the catchy pop hooks that permeated Brad Nowell's songwriting are largely absent from his successors' new material. This deficiency lends itself well to a party band playing an outdoor fiesta, but doesn't hold up over an hour-long studio album. Maybe the Allstars' next area appearance will be at a venue more suited to their strengths - like the Beach.
