This remastered reissue takes us back to the mid-nineties, when the festivals exploded and dance acts headlined the outdoor stages. Dreadzone housed three ex-members of Big Audio Dynamite, the band around Mick Jones that had been very modernist in the mid-eighties. Punk and reggae legend Don Letts was also involved in Dreadzone, so we could speak of a seasoned group.
Second Light was Dreadzone's second album after 360° – which was released on Creation. Even after 17 years it remains a wonderful record that combines ambient and dub with trance and playful dance. “This is Britain”, we hear in the beautiful, deep opening track Life, Love & Unity , a title that immediately brings to mind the cheerful and hedonistic club and festival culture of the nineties. Leftfield opened their classic Leftism in 1995 with a similar track, also sung by Earl Sixteen. Dreadzone took a different approach on the rest of the album, however. The band filled its music with references to English cultural history: atmospheric samples from British films and references to literary works such asThe Lark Ascending en The Canterbury Tales.
Dreadzone shared Orbital's ability to produce successful dance tracks with the use of folky instrumentation. The hit song Little Britain , with its violins and piano, is playful and is known as a club and festival classic of the nineties. Captain Dread , that other well-known single, leans on clever samples and country fiddles. “What The Grid can do with their banjo track Swamp Thing , we should also be able to do with violins”, Dreadzone must have thought.
Second Light is not so poppy and catchy everywhere: the single Zion Youth is heavy, dubby and has wonderful deep basses, nice percussion and the voice of Earl Sixteen. Cave Of Angels is a somewhat dark, languid trip. One Way , with its short-lived trance peak, is one of those tracks that fits in well with the work of Massive Attack and Leftfield and is therefore far removed from the aforementioned hits.
Out Of Heaven , with its deep house atmospheres, fine piano motif and serene vocals, Second Light ends in a pleasant way. However, this reissue offers another live CD with recordings from 1994 and 1995. We hear a track from a Peel session: Maximum . The song stands out because of the trance influences that get more and more grip on the music after a few minutes. Furthermore, we are treated to the performance of Dreadzone on the NME stage of Glastonbury 95, where the band was able to draw on two well-received albums. This was the pinnacle of the band's career (in their own words “our last moment in the Garden of Eden”). The band announces the track Fight The Power with the news of that day: “John Major has resigned!”
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