Random A-List for Set: Jamaica

Artists from Jamaica and reggae-identified artists worldwide.

Here are 12 A-list albums, selected at random from Set: Jamaica. Use your Reload button to get more.

Winston Hussey: The Girl I Adore [1983, Live & Learn]
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−

Linton Kwesi Johnson: In Concert With the Dub Band [1985, Shanachie]
If Island's best-of was a superfluity, this live double is sweet excess, adding the beat, heat, and high spirits of reggae's most cosmopolitan backup to Johnson's calm, reasoned fury. No new material, but the five titles from back when the billing was Poet and the Roots might as well be. Even Making History, which is where Dennis Bovell started fancying up the horns, has gotten more extreme on tour. A−

Knotty Vision [1983, Nighthawk]
Though at first I tagged this as one more choppy multiple-artist compilation, in fact it's as integral and inevitable as death and glory. Beginning with a wailing Burning Spear chant and finishing with a burning Wailing Souls admonition, it's where fundamentalist reggae will convert you if you're destined to feel the spirit at all. Give the first side three or four tries with some time between and you should be able to get to the lyric intensity of six voices possessed by a single song. And eventually the tunes on the B surrender the conviction at their root. A−

Macka-B: Looks Are Deceiving [1990, Ariwa]
Seven songs instead of eight or nine, with room for dub codas that wore thinner for me than they will for the dancehall-friendly. But the songs themselves don't quit--the disses drop science, "Unemployment Blues" gets down to business, "Proud To Be Black" sticks to the proud facts of that overburdened theme. And "Drink Too Much" fulfills the wondrous promise of its brief, eloquent spoken intro: "Now you have some people feel dem idea of a good night out is to go to the pub, drink 15 pints of lager, and then vomit." A−

Mighty Diamonds: Indestructible [1982, Alligator]
There hasn't been a Diamonds album as tuneful as this lovingly pieced-together collection since Right Time in 1976, and Sly & Robbie certainly have elaborated their legerdemain in the meantime. But with most of the three-part unisons giving way to Tabby Shaw's lissome but somewhat reserved tenor and the tunes themselves accommodating the dubious "sincerity" of lovers rock, the new classics number only three: one about prison, one about revolution, and one about passing the pipe. A−

More Intensified! Volume 2 Original Ska 1963-1967 [1980, Mango]
Brit postpunks prefer Jamaican r&b to American r&b for the simple reason that it's punker--despite the horns (nobody comes near a fast tune on trumpet or trombone without years of experience), this stuff is so crude it gets across solely on DIY enthusiasm and the loping pelvis polka of its homegrown groove. Since I wasn't there, I can report without fear of nostalgia that Volume 1's material is no better or worse than this selection. Garveyite special: "Congo War," which makes fun of Kasavubu's name rather than solemnizing his tragedy. By Lord Brynner and the Shieks, spelling in original, wonder if he shaved his head, how punk. A−

Pablo Moses: In the Future [1983, Alligator]
With his precise, delicate, discretely dubwise production--sly horn part there, elegantly understated percussion effect here, bass and drums measured into the groove--and quiet, even timid vocal manner, this poet-turned-rootsman sounds like the most live-and-let-live of ital mystics. In fact he's not only urban but interested in subways and Bellevue, not only militant but smart about it--which is to say among other things that he doesn't seem to think his natural is the only natural. A

Sly and Robbie: Sly and Robbie Present Taxi [1981, Mango]
These catchy (the Wailing Souls' "Sweet Sugar Plum") to groovy (Sheila Hylton's "Bed's Too Big Without You") love songs are why Jah made syndrums: reggae as pure pop, with only Junior Delgado's haunted "Fort Augustus" and General Echo's droll "Drunken Master" presenting any political distraction from the polypercussive hooks of Jamaica's greatest production team if not citizens. A−

Toots and the Maytals: Got to Be Tough [2020, Trojan Jamaica]
Label owner and former Who/Oasis drummer Zak Starkey--who with Sly Dunbar on hand plays guitar here--financed what he didn't know would be a farewell salute from the eternal second banana of first-wave reggae. But when an artist has a bunch of good new songs ready as he pushes 80, now is always the time. What I like about these and Starkey must have too is how conscious they are. Having long favored danceable love songs, he spends most these 36 minutes looking time tough in its ugly face. "Just Brutal," "Warning Warning," and "Got to Be Tough"; bus fares, low wages, invisible pensions, and picking yourself up off the ground. But he's also proud to stand accused for feeding his enemies. A−

UB40: 1980-83 [1983, A&M]
Only Bunny Wailer's inventions have anything on the deep consistency of this integrated English world-class reggae. And if Ali Campbell's sufferating vocal leads are tamer than the outcries of such rootsmen as Winston Rodney and Keith Porter, they certainly don't lack for soul or expressive reach, except perhaps on the upful side, where the fast-talking Astro comes to the rescue before any serious tedium is done. Repeating only three tunes from their U.K. best-of, eschewing long-winded dub, this overdue U.S.-debut compilation is where to get hooked. A−

Tapper Zukie: Man Ah Warrior [1978, Mer]
Dub has certain affinities with heavy metal, which may be why the only album of the stuff I've ever played much is Big Youth's first, Screaming Target, now five years old and never released in the States. Ace discophile Lenny Kaye has compiled this set from the same period, which means that the mix is less volcanic than in recent dub, the vocals more buoyant. Zukie's is fresh enough to really enjoy putting a rap down, too, so he doesn't sound doombound, verbally or musically. Sample segue: from "Simpleton Badness" to "Archie the Rednose Reindeer." A−