Keith LeBlanc - 1986 - Major Malfunction

Keith LeBlanc 

1986 

Major Malfunction

01. Get This 2:43

02. Major Malfunction 4:47

03. Heaven On Earth 4:31

04. Object-Subject (Break Down's Not Enough) 5:13

05. I'll Come Up With Something 3:27

06. Move 0:48

07. Technology Works Dub 5:42

08. You Drummers Listen Good 4:41

09. Ending 1:00

Bonus Tracks

10. Einstein Mad Dub 3:41

11. Mechanical Movements Dub 4:55

12. Old Beat Master Mix 11:03

13. Tick Of Time Instrumental 3:30

Keith LeBlanc – drums, percussion, keyboards, editing, engineering

Skip McDonald – guitar, keyboards, engineering

Nick Plytas – keyboards

Adrian Sherwood – sampler, programming, engineering, mixing

Doug Wimbish – bass guitar, keyboards, guitar

Dog – keyboards ("Move")

It is more than a little disingenuous to refer to this as a Keith LeBlanc album. While his considerable drumming skills and compositional abilities are major parts of why this record is good, there are many other similarly important contributions made by Adrian Sherwood's Tackhead gang (including Sherwood himself). That said, Major Malfunction is a wild, multifaceted piece of contemporary music that welds hard rock onto reggae onto musique concrete. With vocal sampling including everything from Apollo control to Margaret Thatcher, this is a complex, but extremely satisfying work. Avoid if your taste in music (or in Tackhead recordings) doesn't run to the extreme end of experimental.

Major Malfunction was drummer Keith LeBlanc's first full-length album, and it still sounds great today! I had it on vinyl shortly after it came out back in '86, along with several other albums by Tackhead and related projects, but I didn't pick it up on CD until recently.

Tackhead was Keith LeBlanc on drums, Doug Wimbish on bass, Skip McDonald on guitar, and Adrian Sherwood as producer. That's the line-up for MAJOR MALFUNCTION, which many therefore treat as the first Tackhead album in all but name. However, there is no full-length album attributed to Tackhead that is nearly as good as this one!

LeBlanc's first record with the distinctive combination of funk drumming and sampled vocals was "Malcolm X - No Sell Out" (1983), and along with Wimbish and McDonald as the Sugar Hill Records house band he had played on the smash hit by Grandmaster Flash, "The Message" (1982), with the unforgettable chorus: "It's like a jungle sometimes it makes me wonder how I keep from goin' under..."

The title track features the infamous sampled vocal of NASA ground control when the Challenger exploded, calling it a "major malfunction." Another cheerful, enthusiastic voice proclaims "technology works, technology delivers!"

My favorite track, the dark heart of the album and one of the greatest LeBlanc/Tackhead creations, is "Object-Subject," with heavy, ominous chords forming a minor-key repeating pattern heralding the apocalypse. The title and sampled vocal indicates a subterranean Hegelian/Marxist dialectic -- is the working class an object of capital, or does it become a subject and create its own future, its own world?

This 2003 Select Cuts reissue adds four tracks and 23 minutes to the original album's 33 minutes -- what you want is B00009LW3C, which is very well hidden on the site. The added material is all high-quality, and with it you have nearly an hour of some of the best funk ever. The Cleopatra release only includes one shorter added track so go for the Select Cuts, which is available on the Amazon.co.uk site.

Major Malfunction is by now a classic, and it still sounds fantastic 26 years later. And check out another great Keith LeBlanc album, STRANGER THAN FICTION , from 1989.

Adrian Sherwood meets the Sugarhill (and On-U) house drummer for this album of dubby heavy beats. Doug Wimbish and Skip McDonald fill out the group on this set of heavy 80s beats with more than a touch of Sherwoods signature spacey effects and heavy synth work from Leblanc too. An obscure and great sidebar to the whole mid 80s crossover scene, and an album that presaged the whole "Headz" phenomenon that would hodl sway a decade later.