Sowing Seeeds

Seeed will take your feet and own them for an evening. They shook the hell out of Glastonbury in 2005, following a blinding set by Roisin Murphy with the only thing that could have gone next: their eleven-membered dancehall hyper party. According to the band, the thirty folk waiting soon expanded into a crowd of a few thousand, having dwindled between Roisin's set finishing and their's starting. Despite the crowd yo-yo, Seeed brought the bang and bump of the carnival to the festival, ending up as one of the most exciting bands there that year.

Their album Next! demonstrates their party credentials, blasting out track after track of that dancehall bang, with German and English vocals joining the patois. There's some French on there too, courtesy of the RZA's favourite French group, the Saian Supa Crew. Seeed collaborators have included some other names you might know: grime star Kano and Cee Lo Green from Gnarls Barkley, to name a couple.

Who they know is about half as interesting as who they are, though, and that is about half as interesting as what they do. What they do is kick a sound that moves you like only a dancehall groove can. It used to be that reggae recorded outside of Jamaica was a poor cousin of the real stuff, but that has really changed since the seventies. Seeed are just one piece of evidence, and any reggae fan will be able to give you several. Locally we have Mungo's Hifi, working their reggae grooves so hard that the world is noticing, most visibly when Mr Scruff's solid steel mix opened with their track, Ing. Love it or hate it, it's clear reggae is going global again.

When you realise that Seeed have several albums and an Echo award under their belt - and a following in Germany to rival that of David Hasselhoff - it gets hard not to feel silly about the most common initial reaction to this huge German dancehall act – "What, German dancehall? Like, dancehall from Germany?"