The End of an American Dream

Album Review

The End of an American Dream is a collaboration between 71-year-old Lee "Scratch" Perry and Steve Marshall in which Marshall has done all the heavy lifting. It is he who composed the music and played all the instruments on the disc. Those instrumental tracks are full of samples and other computer-generated sounds, including everything from actual musical instruments to traffic noise, all arranged into a rhythmic, percussive whole. Perry's role is restricted to what appear to be free-associative vocal improvisations over those tracks. Marshall adds echo effects and sometimes juxtaposes two or three Perry vocals within a track, but the legendary Jamaican artist seems to have just come into the studio and let fly, leaving it to Marshall to integrate his musical musings into coherent songs, more or less. Perry repeats words from one track to the next, and although titles have been assigned to those tracks, sometimes it seems like one title would have worked better on another track than on the one to which it has been affixed. The opening song, for example, is called "Disarm," but Perry spends most of it reciting the names of different countries; it's the final track, "Disco Cats," that finds him using the word "disarm" over and over. He seems to just sing whatever comes into his head, and sometimes that means borrowing words from other songs. For example, "I Will Be There" features lyrics from Johnny Nash's "I Can See Clearly Now" and Bob Marley's "Punky Reggae Party." Despite its foreboding title, The End of an American Dream is not one of Perry's more ambitious efforts; it doesn't sound like it took him more than one session to record his contributions to Marshall's music, and it doesn't sound like he brought any advance preparation to that session.