ub Trio record and perform live dub music. They feel the need to make this abundantly clear, with a huge sticker on their debut album Exploring The Dangers Of (“LIVE INSTRUMENTAL DUB RECORDED DIRECT TO TAPE IN THE STUDIO”), as well as three live tracks, so I feel I owe it to them to make sure my readers understand too. Dub music, that strange and revolutionary producer’s form of reggae music pioneered by Lee “Scratch” Perry—the art of the remix long before P. Diddy could claim to have invented it—has never been removed from the confines of the studio. Now, thanks to Dub Trio’s dexterous use of technologies that can instantly warp sounds into a dub stylee, it has. I think we can move along now.

There is a novelty to the first half of one’s first listen to Exploring The Dangers Of, of course, in just hearing mixing-board sounds replicated by a band: the wiggling synth lines of “Drive By Dub” and sound effect explosions of “Casting Out The Nines” are fun to hear in the same way seeing an artist use a vocoder on stage is fun to see. As a sheer stunt act, then, Dub Trio get everything right, or just right enough: there are stretches in this album where you can close your eyes, hear the warped reggae sounds, and just swear Max Romeo’s vocals will be coming in at any time.

But therein lies the problem: instead of getting vocals, you get more of the same, as a two-minute novelty becomes a five or six-minute meandering. It’s no coincidence that the shortest song on this set (“Drive By Dub”, a mere 4:11) is the only one that seems fully formed. Once Dub Trio enter the groove, they have basically spent their allotment of ideas for a song, leaving nothing but the fade-out or breakdown: on “Sick Im Kid,” they even must rely on a crush of static to give at least one song a somewhat original ending. (Original, that is, except for the live version of the same song, painfully elongated another 4 minutes.) Other times, the band tries to expand its territory into Medeski, Martin and Wood-lite range, but although “Casting Out The Nines” and “Real Wicked Ways” are appreciated respites from the maddeningly-small range of their dub sounds, they’re still light efforts, sugarcoated with twinkling guitar and as meandering as their straight-dub songs.

Obsessed as they are with translating dub live, Dub Trio seems to have perfected their sound long before bothering to upgrade their material. Perhaps now that they’ve explored the dangers of this approach, they can go back and write some songs.