To quote Emma Goldman, "If I can't dance, I don't want your revolution." The old anarchist revolutionary was actually taking a stand against behavioral fascism, but modern pop music has misinterpreted her in the best possible way. These days, the smart sonic insurgents employ the old bait-and-switch on their audiences, kicking out a booming beat to capture ears and rears alike before dropping the science on them. But this is hardly necessary when the message is melded with the music as eloquently and seamlessly as Asian Dub Foundation does it; in their collective hands, the protest song is not only alive and well, but thriving and evolving.

As much musically innovative as they are politically active, Asian Dub Foundation's sound is a melting pot of jungly breakbeats, dub and dancehall flavors, and snaky guitar lines that morph from rock riffs into Indian sitars and back again, every element of which manages to stand out in the mix as often as it complements the others. Rafi's Revenge, the only other album of theirs readily available in the U.S., may have featured slightly better songwriting, but its thin, sterile drum-n-bass-style production detracted from its impact. In contrast, Community Music fills the empty spaces with exotic atmospherics that tickle the ear while the thicker, beefed-up production firmly plants a boot in it.

I remember reading a review of Primal Scream's Exterminator that praised the band's newfound political anger and snarkily nicknamed the album "The Battle of London." This is complete and utter bullshit. Compared to Community Music, Exterminator is a slick, empty style exercise, reducing powerful rhetoric to incoherent sound bytes that mostly serve as accouterments to Kevin Shields' fancy-schmancy noisemaking. The real British analog to Rage Against the Machine is undeniably Asian Dub Foundation, but that's still being unfair to both groups. Rage's blustery, in-your-face punk anger is uniquely American-- as much a hindrance as an asset; Asian Dub Foundation's sublimation of their discontent beneath their interest in getting people moving on the dance floor is, well... pretty British.

Where Zack de la Rocha hisses and screams, Deedar sports a mush-mouthed dancehall phrasing that sounds at once laid-back and urgent; Chandrasonic is as adept a guitar technician as Tom Morello, deploying riffs that sear and snake or disappearing into clouds of delay noise. And instead of bleak teeth-gnashing and finger-pointing at The Man, Asian Dub Foundation sport a particularly positivist, unity-building vibe that in the hands of lesser artists would become peace-and-love sappiness or multicultural-studies didacticism, but the band makes sure to keep the edges rough while still making protest seem like celebration.

If Community Music is flawed in any way, it's that at 70+ minutes, it can be an exhausting listen. Asian Dub Foundation jump out of the gate with a furious triple dis of Cool Britannia nostalgia ("Real Great Britain"), historical revisionism ("Memory War"), and police corruption ("Officer XX") before settling down into more uplifting grooves, praising their immigrant ancestors on "New Way New Life" and urging listeners to get into the "Collective Mode."

Unfortunately, the energy level begins to sag just as your pulse rate rises; "Crash" and "The Judgement" lean a bit too heavily on mellow reggae styles, and Deedar cedes vocal duties to spoken-word samples and other singers with varying success. While A. Sivanandan's speechifying on "The Colour Line" gets a bit heavy-handed, "Taa Deem" succeeds brilliantly on the strength of the sampled vocals of the late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan meshing with fierce, metallic guitar distortion and impossibly booming percussion. "Truth Hides" slinks along for a while on the strength of squeaky alien ambience and an enchantingly dark chorus, but it can't quite justify its eight-minute length.

For all its rough spots, though, Asian Dub Foundation maintains the delicate balance between raising consciousness and shaking booty; the message never gets preachy, and the music can certainly stand well on its own, as it does on the instrumental coda "Scaling New Heights." Community Music is incredibly ambitious, and amazingly, it delivers everything it promises and then some. It's a revolution, and you can dance to it.

-Nick Mirov