Amsterdam-based Scram C Baby possibly released their best work ever on their latest album Give Us A Kiss. While a band with a 25-year long track record risks to get stuck in the heyday, on their Give Us A Kiss the "founding fathers" of Dutch indie rock sound vital, contemporary and fresh. Dutch national newspaper De Volkskrant ranked the album the maximum five stars: "The intensity and intangibility remain, but audibly longer time was taken to amend: these are no longer AHDH sketches, these really are full-blown finished songs. And how wonderfully recorded; never before SCB sounded so good".
SCB's Frank van Praag is largely responsible for that sound. In Frank’s Messy Sound Studio and with help of Mark Meeuwenoord, he has worked and worked on the widely divergent ideas of the band, until a coherent record was there.
While finishing the album Frank was challenged to do more with these recordings. Such as mixing a dub album in the tradition of Prince Jammy's In The Light Dub (Horace Andy - In The Light) and Mad Professor's No Protection (Massive Attack - Protection). In recent years, Frank van Praag by the name of I Believe In My Mess has recorded dub mixes for, among others, De Jeugd Van Tegenwoordig, Hallo Venray and Canshaker Pi.
First, he stripped the recordings; then, he created new drum & bass tracks originating from Geert de Groot’s bass and his own drum tracks. He then added short guitar interruptions of himself and Mark Meeuwenoord, snatched bits of John Cees Smit's vocals, blending it with spring reverbs, echoes, phasers, arpeggios and spoken-word, commenting the original songs. How does this mix of indierock and jamaican dub styles sound? Indie on dub, garage dub, dub with a twist? Either way, for us it sounds like 100% dub, with I Believe In My Mess at the controls.