Album Review: On-U Sound - Pay It All Back Volume 7 (2019)

I’ve got to be honest: I’m generally such a committed fanboy of just about everything the On-U Sound label releases, I fear I can’t really review this album objectively. I’m concerned that my love for the work of (producer) Adrian Sherwood - across something close to four decades now - will blind me to anything other than its most obvious flaws or shortcomings. But I’ll do my best ... and if I can’t be totally objective, then at the very least I can offer some information about what you can expect from Pay It All Back Volume 7.

The main thing you need to know that it’s the latest release in a long-running series of sampler compilations for the On-U Sound label. It was released in late March, some 23 years after the release of Pay It All Back Volume 6. 

Yet, even after such a lengthy period, many of the same artists who graced the first six volumes - which covered work from the early 80s to the mid 90s - feature again on Volume 7. See, for example, offerings here from label stalwarts like African Head Charge, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, Mark Stewart, Little Axe, Doug Wimbish, and Sherwood himself. 

But it’s far from retro-centric; it’s not a nostalgia document. It’s a sampler to showcase new, recent, or forthcoming On-U Sound releases, Sherwood mixes of material not exclusive to the label, and/or previously unreleased stuff that never found a home elsewhere. 

As such we get a genuine hybrid of musical styles (except generic rock and pop) with the one common denominator being that everything here has, to one degree or another, been touched by the hand of Sherwood. That’s the glue that binds. 

Highlights include: the Play-Rub-A-Dub mix of Horace Andy’s classic ‘Mr Bassie’, Neyssatou and Likkle Mai’s version of Bob Marley’s ‘War’ (see clip below), Denise Sherwood’s ‘Ghost High’, Congo Natty’s ‘UK All Stars in Dub’, Sherwood & Pinch’s ‘Fake Days’ (featuring LSK), Little Axe’s ‘Deep River’, Ghetto Priest’s ‘Slave State’, plus the Coldcut/Roots Manuva collab, ‘Beat Your Chest’, which closes the album … and of course, there’s the understated magnificence of ‘African Starship’, which is a typically eccentric taster from the now 83-year-old Lee Perry’s 2019 album, Rainford ... climb aboard with “Pilot Perry” if you dare! 

The aforementioned flaws and shortcomings are few. Only a couple of tracks (of 18) leave me feeling a little cold, but I guess that’s the nature of sampler compilations. And, in my experience, so far as On-U Sound compilations are concerned, those tracks are just as likely the ones I’ll be listening to most this time next year. 

My own purchase was a rare foray back into the world of the compact disc - my OCD preventing me from deviating from the format I collected the first six volumes in. The supplementary booklet not only offers a plethora of information about the tracks included on the album, it also provides a comprehensive year-by-year guide to the label’s entire back catalogue.