photo credit: Josh Coffman/joshphoto.net

The Long Beach Dub Allstars first came together after Sublime’s Bradley Nowell passed away. Novell’s Sublime bandmates Eric Wilson and Bud Gaugh co-founded the aptly named dub/ska/reggae/rock collective and remained with the group until it broke up in 2002. The Long Beach Dub Allstars reunited in 2012 (at a time when Wilson and Gaugh had moved onto other projects), drawing together many members of the group’s original lineup and extended family. The band is now set to release their first full-length record since 2001. The initial single from this forthcoming eponymous release, “Tell Me,” will be released on January 17 and today we are premiering the official video for the tune.

Drummer Marshall Goodman, one of the band’s co-founders who is also producing the new record tells Relix, “Our approach to making music stems back to the Sublime days. When we were writing ‘40oz to Freedom’ we were very experimental but at the same time we were diligent, understood what we wanted to do, and had the skill sets to do it. When making the self-titled Sublime record, we brought a more solid approach to making music that emphasized understanding what we wanted to do and our skills to get it done. Similarly, the new Long Beach Dub Allstars record carried this approach forward and inspired us to make a solid ‘Studio One’ style album. We have a truly ‘Allstar’ cast and you’ll hear lots of influences from Ska, Hip Hop, Reggae, and all-around groove music.

“We did a lot of pre-production at my studio, and we did lots of satellite recording for the album demos as well. Roger has a studio and Michael was assisting Opie in getting his ideas down. There were a lot of rhythms floating around from sessions that the core of this line-up have done over the years, so we used a bunch of those for demos. It was good to get back on the horse with the core LBDA members. We did run into some of the same setbacks that inhibited us in the past, but we got it done in the end. We kept our instruments and recording methods pretty standard to reinforce our approach.”

Lead vocalist and songwriter Opie Ortiz adds, “We haven’t released a full-length album since 2001 so this a paramount release for us. ‘Tell Me’ is a happy song about either eating good or drinking but just having a good time with reggae. This album will show fans exactly where we are right now as a band and this album feels like a classic Long Beach Dub record from the moment it starts playing.”