Old Time Something

The venerable duo The Twinkle Brothers have managed to carve out one of the most distinctive and consistently rewarding careers in reggae history. Casual listeners may know them best for their trio of late-'70s albums on the Virgin subsidiary Frontline, while dub aficionados prize the cavernous, echo-soaked productions that Norman Grant recorded for his own Twinkle imprint at the dawn of the ‘80s. The core of the group’s considerable legacy, however, is a more obscure group of recordings: those that the itinerant duo cut between 1966 and 1974 as they wandered from studio to studio. In those days they cut sides for nearly every Jamaican producer of note, including August Clarke, Lee Perry, Phil Pratt, and others. Old Time Something collects 14 of these early tracks and includes everything from the loping ska of the Leslie Kong–produced “Somebody Please Help Me” to the profoundly deep roots of “Babylon a Fight” and the indignant, falsetto-accented protest against overcrowding in Kingston’s slums, “Room Full All Full.”