I keep thinking I’ve said pretty much all I have to say about dub, toasting and reggae, and then something is reissued I feel obliged to pay attention to or something I want to draw attention to. Dennis Alcapone’s Forever Version, for example, makes explicit hip-hop’s Jamaican roots. Dennis Alcapone was one of the first toasters to record, jumping in during instrumental spaces to rhyme, exhort the dancers and shout out phrases that serve as counterpoint to the song and the rhythm. His “scrub it baby, scrub it” is akin to the early nonsense syllables of rap when the DJ was the star, not the MC. You can weary of his trademark “Yeah yeah YAYYYYY,” but the toaster’s interaction with the singers on the songs is largely unprecedented and has few followers outside of Jamaica. The high points: “Midnight Version,” which features Alcapone toasting over a reggae version of “Everybody’s Talkin’,” and his sense of rhythm on “El Paso.”

The Lone Ranger’s On the Other Side of Dub was first released in 1977, and by then the dub tracks that the vocalists sang/spoke over had been cleaned of extraneous vocals and a good deal of the midrange. Horns give the song a hint of form, and the slinky, throbbing bass leads the song. Usually, I prefer the dub tracks without any vocals, but the dub tracks aren’t psychedelic enough to move me and they sound a little cramped. As is the case with many of the Heartbeat reissues, I’m glad this is in the world and that reggae’s history remains available, but this isn’t so distinctive a chapter in that I’ll return to it often.

For a lesser known story, try Summer Records in Toronto. Jamaican ex-pats found a reasonably welcoming community in Toronto, where Keith Brown started the label. Summer Records Anthology: 1974-1988 isn’t life-changing, but it exposes a body of work that has been unjustly overlooked. The best of it—the earliest songs, by Johnny Osborne, Bobby Gaynair and Earth, Roots & Water—are warm, dub-influenced tracks with a spiritual sense of soul in the vocals. There’s a lot of space and surprise in Brown’s dub productions—best illustrated by “One and Only One” by Adrian “Homer” Miller—more so than in many Jamaican producers from the same era.

That makes the last tracks particularly disappointing. Most of the album was recorded before 1979, and it makes a case for Brown as a distinctive musical voice developing on his own. The last two tracks come from 1988 and they show him dabbling with the sort of electro-reggae typified by Black Uhuru’s “Solidarity.” He seems to be trying on the trend of the day, but by comparison, the tracks sound simply thin and cheap. Fortunately, the rest of the album is consistently rewarding.