Library Science
Dolphin
(Happi Tyme Records)
Library Science’s third album, Dolphin, marks a departure from the local trio’s first two albums, High Life Honey (2004) and The Chancellor (2007). Whereas their second album impressively expanded and improved the dub experiments of the first, the third pretty much replaces the dub experiments with something new: electro experiments—Dolphin has only two dubs, one of which, “Barbaro,” is more a mix of electro with dub.
The results of the new direction are mixed—some tracks are brilliant and others are average. The best of the brilliant tracks is “Bye Bye Birdy,” which subjects a melancholy or, better say, ruminative melody to sporadic drum smashes and shocks. The least interesting (and least experimental) of the average tracks is “Lightning Strikes,” which is nothing more than a terrible clash between a pounding beat and a jarring rock guitar. But altogether, the 11 electro tracks are not as special as the two dubs—”Barbaro” and “Trucker Speed Dub,” both of which contain some of the magic that’s found all over The Chancellor.
But maybe I’m just missing something that I might catch during a future encounter with Dolphin. It’s not impossible that the record is in actuality the trio’s best—a fact that would be hard for me to see, because I naturally prefer dub to electro. What’s happening now could be the same thing that happened many years ago, when I reviewed Alpha’s second album, The Impossible Thrill. That review basically denounced Alpha’s new direction (the Bristol-based duo replaced sampling with live instruments) and heaped tons of praise on the first work, Come from Heaven. These days, however, I listen to the second album far more than I do the first one. So, in the end, Alpha was right and I was wrong. Dolphin might become my next Impossible Thrill. 
