Dr. Israel put his myriad influences on parade for 1998’s Inna City Pressure, an album that successfully spliced the head bobbing goodness of reggae’s lazy upstroke with the momentum of jungle’s frenetic breakbeats. The album suffered a bit from its sprawl, but Israel justified his inclination to wander with invigorating mash-ups like ‘The Doctor Vs. The Wizard’, where he makes a crunchy Black Sabbath riff sound perfectly natural looped over a jungle break. ROIR is re-releasing Inna City Pressure with two bonus tracks, presumably to whet our appetites for the October release of Doc’s new album Patterns of War. The re-release sounds great, but it probably won’t do much to recommend the purchase of Patterns of War. If the lead singles of Patterns are to be trusted, Doc has more or less abandoned the reggae-jungle fusion that characterized Inna City Pressure for a dub-inflected trip-hop style that sounds a bit like Thievery Corporation. The cuts are solid, but with ROIR’s promo-material promising Doc’s “most accessible material to date,” fans of Dr. Israel’s scatter-brained genre-play may be disappointed.
