Winston Hussey

• The Girl I Adore [Live & Learn, 1983] A-

Consumer Guide Reviews:

The Girl I Adore [Live & Learn, 1983]
This is the kind of reggae most Americans dismiss as impossibly monotonous: the melodies are simple and often repetitive, the singing plaintive and crude, the words barely literate. I'm not claiming any of these qualities are virtues in themselves, but they can be. Working a shameless variation on Gregory Isaacs, Hussey projects intense innocence of a sort increasingly rare in English-language music; replete with homy references to liniment and parlors and pajamas, his sexual musings and militant pacifism must seem a little uncool even in Kingston. And for those with ears to hear, he's backed by the Roots Radics, who are far from succumbing to the subtler monotony that eventually afflicts great studio bands. A-