King Jammy’s Presents The Best Of General Trees

2012, Jammy’s Records (digital only)

So as I come to the very last (4 real?) post about General Trees on bimkillhim.com, we can highlight how Trees’ first record was actually a Jammy’s 7″ dropped in 1983 titled Treat The Women Right. According to Discogs, this and Horseman Style are the only Jammy’s-branded Trees releases, and to go on a very quick and early tangent, can we appreciate how bizarre it is that there is a cut of Horseman Style released NOT on Black Scorpio, the ‘horseman sound’, but rather Jammy’s! When you think about it, this is probably the single most Scorpio-coded tune, and it of all tunes really should not be on another label. Anyway here are embeds of the Scorpio and Jammy’s cuts respectively:

To be honest I didn’t even know there was a Jammy’s cut until I did some research for this post; I’m very glad to hear that it’s good. Different sources online put the Jammy’s cut date at 1984 and 1986, I think 86 is more likely, and whichever one came first, it’s still funny (Scorpio cut is 85).

So that is that and this is not that because this is NOT a 2012 record, no my bredren, these hyper-obscure recordings are (almost definitey) all from the 80s. If you look hard enough you can probably find all these riddims on other Jammy’s releases from the 80s, the only one I can share off the top of my head is how Get Ready is on the riddim from Juby Rock by Michael Palmer. 

I don’t think this can reasonably be called “The Best Of General Trees” by anyone, that is just marketing for what is really just a compilation album (though none of these tunes appear on other LPs), but the marketing is rubbish because this record is not really known to anybody, and it only appears on services like fucking Amazon Music or whatever. Digital-only I believe. I expect there are a lot of Trees superfans out of there that have no idea it exists – it’s not even on Discogs in any case. What you really want to know is whether or not it’s worth a listen, and the answer is unequivocally yes, this is a good record, but it falls short from most other Trees albums in the ‘character’ department. It is however instantly identifiable by its Jammy’s riddims (which are all great) and also by its absurdly high volume. This might be the single loudest master I have in my whole bajillion gigabytes of music on my hard drive, clocking in at 0.4dB higher than Pulse Demon by Merzbow on average. This is a scientifically musical result, don’t doubt my claim.

Then what about lyrics and style? It’s General Trees and if you have heard any of his records then you know what to expect. Righteousness and storytelling. A couple anthem tunes like Get Ready and This A The Boom, and a tribute to his mentor Sassafrass’ Mad Man Party. None of the tunes really stand out from the pack, which makes the ‘my picks’ section of my blogpost tough to come up with. All of them are good, with Trees in fine fashion and the hoarser side of his voice on display, likely owing to the microphone at the Jammy’s studio. While not the most compelling Trees album, there’s really nothing wrong with it. And to best illustrate the ‘character’ for this album, the final observation is that the tunes are organised in alphabetical order.

My picks: Get Ready, Love In Armagedon Time, Mad Man Party, This A The Boom, You Gimme Love
Bim count: 0