The album opens with “Dub Conquers All” \u2014 a statement of intent so confident it borders on the theological \u2014 and from that moment the record establishes its own sovereign territory: a music that owes everything to its roots and nothing to its moment. Four languages (Amharic, Spanish, French, English) drift through these grooves as naturally as weather systems crossing invisible borders. That polyglot ambition was always Page’s signature. The man understood, with the bone-deep certainty of a true believer, that dub is not a genre but a philosophy: strip back, open up, let the space breathe.<\/p>
The Ethiopian vocalist Mimi Zenebe is the album’s emotional centrepiece, her voice threading through the low-end architecture like gilt through timber. When she sings in Amharic over the riddims that Page and Mills have constructed \u2014 warm, heavy, never ponderous \u2014 the combination achieves something that defies easy categorisation. It is neither world music in the fusty Radio 3 sense nor reggae in any conventional Jamaican tradition; it is its own thing, bearing the watermark of a sensibility that spent decades listening across continents.<\/p> Ben Somers’ saxophone arrives at precisely the right moments, flaring and subsiding, while Paul Chivers’ percussion sits within the mix rather than atop it \u2014 a choice that reveals careful production thinking. Tim Whelan of Transglobal Underground brings keyboards that feel simultaneously contemporary and out of time, which is precisely the mood Page’s best work always inhabited. Holly Holden and George Riley offer guest vocal contributions that are generous rather than showy; they understand their role within a collective endeavour.<\/span><\/p> “24 Carat Dub Affair” showcases the wit that ran through Page’s work like a seam of gold \u2014 puns and wordplay riding basslines with the ease of long practice \u2014 while “And The Gods Made Dub” has a grandeur that is earned rather than announced, building through dub delay and reverb into something genuinely devotional. The production throughout, split between Page’s original recordings and the completion work of Mor\u00e1n and Mills, is remarkably seamless. One cannot hear the join, which speaks to the intimacy of their collaboration and the clarity of shared vision.<\/span><\/p> Co-producer Mills, in his sleeve note, writes of corruption, war, inequality and a world “spinning out of control,” concluding that “we need more dub.” It might read as bathetic, but listening to this record, it is hard to argue. Dub, at its best, is music that insists on spaciousness at a time when everything contracts \u2014 political discourse, cultural empathy, the distance between one human and another. Page spent his career proving that a bassline and the right reverb could dissolve borders that politicians draw in blood.<\/span><\/p> *Dub Will Keep Us Together* is a farewell that refuses sentimentality without denying grief, a posthumous release that sounds like presence rather than absence. It stands as the final chapter of a Real World Records association stretching back to 2001, and it closes that story with honour. Nick Page was, as Peter Gabriel noted, a great artist and a great man. This album is both monument and proof.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
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