‘Temple of I and I’ Brings Low Quality to Hi-Fi

On the 1976 album “Super Ape” from reggae pioneer Lee “Scratch” Perry and his band The Upsetters, a refrain emerges from a punchy drum intro amid creeping rhythms and haunting back-up vocals: “Zion blood is flowing through my veins so I and I will never work in vain.” It’s the lo-fi sound of the primordial soup, and echoing from it is an expression of social solidarity between “I and I” (a Jamaican Patois term for “we”).

Flash-forward four decades to 2017. The Washington D.C.-based DJ collective Thievery Corporation release their new album “The Temple of I and I,” inspired by the legacy of dub music and reggae. The sound of the lead track “Thief Rockers” is pristine hi-fi, the rhythms are distinctly Jamaican but sanitized, unlike The Upsetters’ thick, rumbling percussion, and everything is smothered with a generous helping of ambient house synth. While there’s nothing wrong with a new take on an old sound, Thievery Corporation come back for their tenth studio album with an over-produced pastiche of Jamaican sound, empty of the richness of analog recording that marked their predecessors in this genre. This, unfortunately, has become par for the course with the group, which has been taking the diverse genres of world music and mixing them down to the lowest common denominator of trip-hop, chill-out, and electronica for over two decades. While trip-hop and turntablism gave the world arguably the most original musical work of the 1990’s—DJ Shadow’s “Endtroducing…..” (1996)—the cultural sampling of Thievery Corporation is about as tasteful as the cultural collage plastered over the cover of the “Temple of I and I.”

The politics come through just as flat as the music. Remarks like “bring fire to Illuminati” on “Thief Rockers” play into the vaguely paranoid agenda that has always marked the group which produced albums like “The Mirror Conspiracy” (2000), “Radio Retaliation” (2008), and “Culture of Fear” (2011). The tracks “Letter to the Editor,” “Weapons of Distraction,” “Fight to Survive” and “Drop Your Guns” are particularly unambiguous. If the idea of the “Temple of I and I” is meant to be a point of solidarity against the Man, the Illuminati, or whatever the fashionable term for institutional power is these days, the tepid result is more corporate than ever.

This return to business as usual for the group in part came as a slight surprise after their poignant 2014 album “Saudade,” a revival of Brazilian bossa nova music in the tradition of João Gilberto, Antônio Carlos Jobim, and Sergio Mendes. Still the most tightly focused Thievery Corporation album to date, narrowing in on one particular musical tradition and taking a more understated approach to the synths, which flowed more naturally over the crisp guitars, saw the group finding a happy medium between the old guard and the new of easy listening music (“Depth of my Soul” was begging to be the theme song for a Bond movie). This becoming change was unfortunately ditched on “The Temple of I and I.” In fact, the album’s most interesting track, “Time + Space,” with its repetitive guitar reminiscent of The xx’s “Crystalised” and elements of big beat production that feel like the closing song to a ‘90s action movie, owes much of its substance to the presence of multilingual “Saudade” collaborator Loulou Ghelichkhani. Despite the new album’s region-specific focus, old habits die hard, and the Jamaican sound finds itself playing second fiddle to the early ‘00s ambient house instead of the other way around. With a budding generation of music listeners being molded by Spotify’s premade playlists for every possible mood, in many ways now is the perfect time for a new set of electronica artists and classic albums. “The Temple of I and I” will not number among them.