Dub Skin

These days, bands are rarely willing to commit or admit to just one genre.

Commitment problems arise in bands that embrace the fusion route (i.e. jazz-metal-hip-hop or funk-flamenco-gospel). Such cross pollination can be reckless. When it works, invigoration and surprise follows. When it doesn’t, like a dinner date at a KFC/Taco Bell/Pizza Hut, there’s neither dignity nor digestibility. Issues with admission exist in bands that dodge definition: They wince at the prospect of slapping a name on their music for compartmentalization in the marketplace or simplification in newsprint. Maybe their stand is valid. Or maybe they’re raging egoists.

Fort Collins five-piece Dubskin is a roots reggae band. And that’s it.

Lead singer Jamal Skinner, a.k.a. I.fficial, spent the late nineties in Fort Collins reggae and hip-hop acts. After a five-year hiatus from music, working as an electrician in L.A. and Las Vegas, he returned to Fort Collins in 2006 with the sole purpose of forming a “strictly” reggae band.

“Everyone listens to reggae here,” he says. “Well, a lot of people do. And, it didn’t make sense — with as many musicians who are in town, who play so many different instruments — why there wasn’t one reggae band. So when I moved back, my intention was to find the right people.”
Dubskin drummer Corey Eberhard, a.k.a. Yroc, also drummer for Fort Collins electronic group Listen and a solo MC, coordinated the recruitment. He collected Dean Curtis (The Dean), also the soundman at the Aggie Theater, on bass; Mike DuCharme (Seeps) on guitar; and, on keyboards, Jason Wieseler (Jahsonic), who also DJs with local turntable collective Zion SoulJahz.

Although they’ve been playng together for less than a year, Dubskin has already opened for reggae mainstays like Israel Vibration and Groundation. They were the only Fort Collins group to play the Poudre River Reggae Festival at the Mishawaka in July, with biggies like The Itals and Jr. Toots.

Dubskin’s two principal songwriters, Skinner (lyrics) and Wieseler (music) both identify as “Rastas” and, to them, the lifestyle and the music are in lockstep.

Band members refer to “roots reggae” not only as their sound — which incorporates traditional reggae amenities like a thick, crawling bass line interchanging with staccato guitar up-strokes and reverb-heavy vocals — but also as their belief in Rastafarianism, the central philosophy of reggae music since its beginnings in Jamaica in the late sixties.

“Most people think it is a religion,” Wieseler says. “But it’s much more than that. It’s your daily life; it’s your liberty, what you eat, who you interact with, what you do and how you dress.”

Dubskin’s lyrics exhibit fundamental Rastafarian tenants: a devotion to Jah or God, raising awareness about the plight of oppressed peoples, an opposition to Babylon (mass culture), a celebration of marijuana as spiritual aide and a back-to-Africa perspective.

“There’s a lot of songs that we have about the consciousness of Africa, the despair that’s there right now,” Skinner says. “And I think Dubskin is, the movement of it is for me, vocally and lyrically, based upon trying to uplift people’s minds to look there and look what’s going on in that continent.”

Dubskin is working on their first album at Morningwood Studios in Fort Collins and hopes to have a CD ready for a release party sometime in the fall. Until then, they are tightening up as a live band, writing more songs and, above all else, staying true to the roots.

“We talk about Haile Selassie, the most high, in our songs a lot because Rastafarianism is real to us,” Skinner says. “So that’s why we’re not coming as a fraudulent reggae band. The roots are in us, based upon belief and from loving the music enough to know that it needs to be heard.”

Dubskin Opening for Israel Vibration, Friday, August 24, 8pm, and for Pato Banton, Saturday, August 25, 8pm Mishawaka Amphitheater, 13714 Poudre Canyon Hwy, Bellvue Tickets: Friday: $22/adv, $25/dos; Saturday: $20, all ages Mishawakaconcerts.com - Rocky Mountain Chronicle - August 2007