How Many Times Can You Hear the Same Reggae Song Before You Go Insane?

When Romanian gypsy band Mahala Rai Banda recorded their hit Balkan Reggae a few years back, it was an appreciative shout-out from one hot ghetto band to the thousands of others in another time zone who may have inspired it. Now the song’s come full circle with the Balkan Reggae Remixed compilation, a bunch of Jamaicans (and Jamaican soundalikes) doing their own  thing with the song. From a 2013 perspective, the original seems a lot less surreal: a brooding roots reggae groove with a cimbalom? Why the hell not?

By that standard, the new mixes are even trippier – a New Yorker would call this “Mehanata music.” What’s coolest is that most of them are so different that you forget that underneath, they’re all the same song. La Cherga’s version has a vocal cameo from Adisa Zvekic that starts out pretty cliched but then gets reprocessed with a weird, ghostly tone-bending effect. Nick Manasseh’s version has Gregory Fabulous’ skibbitty-doo skanking and constant call to “soundboy” for no real reason at all. Jstar does a fabulously trippy job of stripping the song to its accordion roots and then back, adding silly stoner synth bass and video game-style EFX along the way. Mad Professor starts very subtly and then gets very unsubtle with the echo and the sequencer. G-Vibes gives newschool crooner Errol Linton a bit of funky wah guitar but otherwise pretty much leaves the song alone.

The Vibronics pretty much phone in their take; Koby Israelite add singer Annique’s jaunty, jazz-tinged vocal track. Kanka go for a wickedly echoey oldschool Scratch Perry vibe. By the time the last track, which doesn’t add anything, comes around, it’s time for the original, which ironically isn’t on this mix. Who is the audience for this, other than the limited number of people who plug their phones into a sound system and call themselves DJ’s? Probably anyone who’s in the house listening to those playlists.

John Brown’s Body Puts Out Their Best Studio Album in Ages

Imagine your band’s been on the road for the better part of twenty years. You can sell out pretty much any midsize venue you feel like playing. Recordings of your concerts – both the ones made by fans, and your own, which you give away for free – are shared and prized by collectors around the world. Why on earth would you make a studio album – let alone one that sounds ok on phone earbuds, but which sounds AMAZING on a good stereo system?

Because you play so many shows that you’re bound to sell out whatever you manufacture? Because people who are stoned enough will buy pretty much anything? Or maybe just because the band is in a good place right now and you want to document this particular period in its history? Maybe all of the above. Veteram roots reggae band John Brown’s Body are playing Brooklyn Bowl tonight around 9 and as of this afternoon, it isn’t sold out yet – get to the venue by 8 and you should be fine. And you can pick up their new album Kings & Queens, just out from the folks at Easy Star Records, if you want a souvenir that sounds as good as the concert.

John Brown’s Body has been making solidly decent album since the early 90s. They used to have more of a dub vibe, with wah-wah on the keys of all things, and more orthodox, “praise Jah” type lyrics. These days, they’re louder and more driving, Mike Keenan’s guitar pushing the music with Nate Edgar’s bass and Tommy Benedettt’s drums, Jon Petronzio’s keys adding a dubwise edge, their killer horn section usually lighting the way melodywise.

The opening track on the new album has the hook in the bass – it’s irresistible, just like the horn charts. Although trumpeter Sam Dechenne, saxophonist Drew Sayers and trombonist Scott Flynn – who write all their own arrangements – look back to vintage 1960s Motown and soul, the brass on John Brown’s Body albums and this one especially is good enough to recommend to gypsy music fans. They follow with a big anthemic sway on the second track, Invitation (which sounds like “invocation” – it’s that kind of thing).

The Burning Spear influence is all over this record. Track three, Plantation, reminds of Man in the Hills, a snowstorm of keyboard EFX kicking off a brief bass-and-drum interlude before the song picks up again.Shine Bright has the gleaming horns and stutter pulse of late 80s Spear mixed with jazzy 70s Stylistics-style ballad chords. And just as Jah Spear did for one of his heros, Marcus Garvey, JBB finally send a shout out to the guy whose name they took – and reference Old Marcus Garvey along the way.

Empty Hands has a noir Ghost Town/Satta Massaganna arrangement to match its  “Mr. Officer leave me alone” lyric with a little hip-hop vibe as it winds out. Fall on Deep sounds like a Marley love ballad from the Kaya days. Dust Bowl might be the best track here, with its big, intense, swirly minor-key ambience and ominous global warming-era lyrics. By contrast, The Battle reverts to the band’s more anxious, stripped-down spiritually-minded sound from the Kevin Kinsella days back in the 90s, frontman Elliot Martin letting his vocals linger (and is that autotune or just some weird flange effect on the harmonies?!?).

As far as horns go, the arrangements on the dub-influenced Starver are gorgeously dark and bluesy; on Deep Summer, arguably the album’s best track, they’re warm, enveloping and absolutely beautiful. The album closes with Searchlight, which is not a reggae song – it’s a big mid 80s style new wave pop anthem with a sequencer, like ZZ Top used to use. It also offers a nod to P-Funk, sonically if not rhythmically. It sounds suspiciously like it was written to close a show on a, um, high note, a big singalong where everybody in the choom gang who hasn’t reached total absorption yet gets an excuse to raise their lighter to their lips one final time.

Kiwi’s On the Move with Good Original Reggae

Jersey City reggae band Kiwi’s new album On the Move manages to be purist without being a ripoff. Frontman/guitarist Alex Tea’s songs draw a straight line back to Bob Marley and Burning Spear at their late 70s peak, while adding original touches including elements of jazz and Brazilian music. The arrangements are everything that’s good about roots reggae: they’re slinky and hypnotic yet constantly change shape, with light dub tinges that enhance the psychedelic factor. Much as the album’s sonics are crisply digital, the production values are strictly oldschool. What’s interesting about this band is that everybody seems to come from either a rock or jazz background, yet they get what reggae is all about better than some of the Jamaican posse does these days. Drummer Ramsey Norman is a harder hitter than most of his reggae counterparts, and like the great Sly Dynbar he does a lot more than just the one-drop beat, teaming up with percussionist Ben Guadalupe. Likewise, bassist Matt Quinones basically functions as a second lead guitarist, a couple of octaves lower. Keyboardist Dave Stolarz varies his textures from swoopy Wailers-style organ to various piano and synth voicings: he’s their secret dubwise edge.  The horn section of tenor saxophonist Barami Waspe, trumpeter Curtis Taylor and trombonist Rob Edwards make the most of a bunch of juicy charts, adding to the richly tuneful, retro 70s vibe.

The opening track, Aprendiz, blends tropicalia and anthemic rock over a rootsy groove, like a Brazilian John Brown’s Body. The second track, Burden, is a killer singalong, the first of several rocksteady-style numbers that remind of vintage early 70s Toots & the Maytals. They go for a pensive Marley feel with Change and then add spaghetti western touches and Augustus Pablo-ish melodica on the apprehensively jungly Dead Man, which segues into an unexpectedly weird, trippy atmospheric interlude.

Edwards’ balmy trombone lines pair off with the jaunty bounce of Fine and Mellow, while Give a Little goes back to the rocksteady before raising to a gorgeously soaring chorus. I Can Fall nicks the riff from the Burning Spear classic Man in the Hills and takes it more upbeat on the wings of the horns; the band hits a dub passage and segues from there into Lady Lady, the poppiest thing here, which has the feel of a carefree early 70s Johnny Clarke hit.

The most intense and original track here is Pirambu, an unexpectedly ominous, lushly anthemic tune with intricate jazz-tinged guitar, ethereal horns and another hypnotic dub interlude. Pema mixes up samba and reggae, while Sun Never Set is sort of Marley’s Dem Belly Full crossed with Henry Mancini. The album winds up with the easygoing Tell You Once, spiced with a sweet trombone solo and the best outro of any of the songs here. Kiwi play the album release show tonight, Feb 21 at Joe’s Pub at 11 PM.

A New Album from Ageless Freddie McGregor

Freddie McGregor’s new album Di Captain is just out, and the whole thing is streaming at Large Up. The veteran reggae rootsman has something for everybody here. Several tracks look back to the early 80s when dancehall was starting to gather steam and push the rootsier stuff off the charts. Other tracks set up shop at the crossroads where glossy 70s soul-pop and reggae meet. Productionwise, the album is a capsule history of recent roots reggae: considering how much the production varies from track to track, it’s possible that these may have been recorded across the years.

The first number, Move Up Jamaica has real organic riddims – organ, tasteful guitar, bass and drums. A feel-good shout-out to fifty years of Jamaican independence, it’s sort of McGregor’s Smile Jamaica  – and sadly one of the few here that has the oldschool sound that McGregor has held onto for so long while his compatriots were dying off, literally or figuratively. Many of the other songs have a familiar, techy teens vibe: synth bass, drum machine and lots of keybs, everything anchored by McGregor’s imperturbible vocals. There are also a handful that mix slickness and rootsiness in the same vein as all those Dr. Dread productions from the 90s: real bass and drums, but with perfect digital separation.

McGregor’s voice has taken on more grit as the years have passed, but otherwise he’s none the worse for the wear and tear of a career that spans fifty years (as the opening intro proudly announces, he was seven when he first lent his voice to the Clarendonians in the early 60s). He covers the Beatles’ You Won’t See Me and doesn’t embarrass himself, evokes American soul acts from the 70s like the Stylistics with the distantly jazz-tinged Love I Believe In and There You Go, and adds soca touches on Jah Love Di Whole A Wi and Equal Rights (an easygoing original, not the Peter Tosh classic).

The only track with the kind of edge that McGregor had at the peak of his late 70s Rasta phase is Bag A Hype, an early 80s dancehall-flavored number where he admits to missing the old days, lamenting that “Di youths have gone astray, talking about dem against us” as it fades out. The rootsier Africa, by contrast, is a lot more optimistic. McGregor follows that with the strangely ominous More Love in the Ghetto, driven by an unexpectedly creepy faux organ patch from the synth. A cover of Marley’s Rainbow Country misses the warmth of the original; likewise, a sufferah’s anthem, a cheesy love ballad and cover of the Everly Bros.’ Let It Be Me are less than convincing. Still, you have to hand it to McGregor for toiling on even as he watched his audience turn over and be replaced by a younger generation who weren’t around when Jamaican music was at its late-70s peak.

Some Memorable, Surreal Barrington Levy Tracks from the Archives

Barringon Levy is one of the hardest working men in the reggae business, a familiar face on tour year in, year out. For those who know him as a teddybear crooner, that persona is some distance from Levy’s much more eclectic early years in Jamaica, right at the point where dancehall started to break away from roots and become its own style. The folks over at VP Records - who’ve been putting out Strictly the Best compilations since the 80s – have just released the mammoth 40-track compilation Barrington Levy: Sweet Reggae Music 1979-84. It’s good inspiration for anybody putting together a playlist, not to mention a fond look back at a time and place gone forever.

Ironic that the Roots Radics, who back Levy on most of these tracks, would be instrumemtal in the development of early dancehall to the point where they inadvertently put themselves and other bands like them out of business, more or less! A cynic might say that these tracks sound like they were thrown together on the fly, which they undoubtedly were. By the same token, it’s amazing how much imagination went into making them interesting, and giving them an individual flavor, especially considering how slapdash these singles were assembled.  If you want to hear a fifteen-year-old youthman from Kingston who sounds stoned out of his mind, crank up the opening track, Collie Weed: if the lyric is to be trusted, his mom sent him out to buy some. He’s a little older on the album’s last track, the early dancehall classic Under Mi Sensi: “Babylon yuh na like ganja much, but it bring foreign currency pon de island..”.

On the 38 tracks in between, the production and riddims are refreshingly organic: fat bass, echoey acoustic piano, biting skanky guitar, real drums and percussion. And it’s interesting to hear Levy’s singing style developing – as fine a crooner as he became, there’s a raw, hungry quality to many of the vocals here that’s absent in his more polished, mature material. And the songs are a microcosm of late 70s/early 80s Jamaican reggae history. Levy’s Bounty Hunter sounds like a prototype for Israel Vibration’s Mr. Consular Man, and is his song Sister Carol a shout-out to the Brooklyn dancehall sister…or did she take her name from it? On one of the relatively rare tracks, Soldier, did Bingy Bunny or whoever’s playing the guitar nick the exaggerated echo effect from the Clash,. or did Mick Jones steal it from him?

Levy and band take Black Uhuru’s brooding, bitter Shine Eyed Gal and transform it into a surrealistically sunny anthem. The rest of the collection alternates between gnomic Rasta rambles like Trod with Jah Jah and somewhat less mystical numbers like Mary Long Tongue, whose subtext remains amusing after all these years. The first of the two discs focuses more on songs, the second more on dub, although there aren’t any versions, per se, of any of the hits. Many of these songs are funny, many are pretty weird, and they show how many diverse directions Levy was willing to go in just to put himself on the reggae map. Thirty years later, he’s still here, testament to a rare brand of persistence.

Groundation Builds a Mighty Ark

Among current-day roots reggae bands, Groundation are the template for how to do it right. A look at their tour schedule confirms their popularity; a listen to their discography confirms the intelligence and unpredictability of their music. These guys do just about everything psychedelic that you can do with reggae: long anthemic songs designed to be jammed out live, slowly and methodically moving from section to section, transcending any predictable verse/chorus structure. If that last sentence seemed to go on forever, the same is true of this band’s songs. And yet, they’re not boring. It wouldn’t be right to let the year go by without giving a mention to this tremendous group’s latest album, Building an Ark.

The little touches mean a lot here: the stark, gospel flavored intro, acoustic guitar paired off against churchy blues piano on the title track; the way keyboardist Marcus Urani switches from eerie, echoey Rhodes to a surreal, 80s-flavored DX7 synthesizer patch on the second track; or Jason Robinson’s tropical, balmy tenor sax solo on the fourth one. Light dub oscillations percolate through the first few songs and then subside, as if to say, it’s time to get serious: in stark contrast to most jam bands, a lot of thought went into this album.

The opening cut sets the stage, section by section, lit up by a long, soulful David Chachere trumpet solo on the way out. The second number, Humility, sounds like the Wailers but more digitally produced. Be That Way launches off a shuffling vamp that blends Bob Marley’s Exodus with Isaac Hayes psychedelic soul, a vibe they bring back later on with Keep It Up and then the album’s steady, slow closing track, The Dreamer.

They hit a nice, edgy, bouncy groove on Merry-Go-Round, contemplating such things as “What did our old friend Columbus do for you?” and “Would you be a friend or enemy as we go walking through the night?” Lyrically, they may not be breaking any new ground, but at least they have a worldview beyond Bushwick or Laurel Canyon. Pakaya Way takes a richly eerie, noir-tinged, minor-key detour that slowly grows less menacing as it moves toward a vintage 70s soul vibe. They keep the dark/light juxtaposition going with Who Is Gonna, with layers of overlapping vocals and a counterintuitive series of changes culminating in a laid-back but incisive Ryan Newman bass solo – and it all works.

After a brief acoustic interlude, they launch into Daniel, an elegy for someone who “Never would talk, so they call him a coward, but he would speak in the final hour,” peaking with a long, winding, understatedly intense Harrison Stafford guitar solo. It’s everything you could possibly want from a reggae band at this point in history. Groundation just played Highline Ballroom a couple of weeks ago; you can count on a return trip, or maybe two if we’re lucky, sometimes in 2013.

Super Hi-Fi Puts Out the Best Reggae Album of the Year

Meet the best reggae album of the year – and it doesn’t have any lyrics. Brooklyn band Super Hi-Fi’s new album Dub to the Bone is all instrumental. Essentially, it’s live dub – to an extent, they’re doing live what Scratch Perry would do in the studio. But this album keeps the studio wizardry to a minimum and focuses on the songs. Theyv’e got an oldschool echoplex, which they use judiciously and absolutely psychedelically, but it’s the tunes and the playing that make this psychedelic. Since this was recorded as a vinyl record for Brooklyn’s excellent, eclectic Electric Cowbell label, there’s an A-side and a B-side.

The band keeps it simple and catchy as they make their way methodically from one hook to another. A lot of reggae is verse/chorus/verse/etc. and this isn’t, which keeps it interesting while maintaining a fat groove. And while a lot of dub is an endless series of textures echoing and fading in and out of the mix, the band does this live without missing a beat. Bassist Ezra Gale’s songs lean toward the dark and menacing side: some of this is absolutely creepy, as the best reggae and ska can be.

The opening track, Washingtonian works trippy variations on a dark reggae vamp, the occasional vintage newsreel sample adding snide commentary on the military-industrial complex (is that Eisenhower?) The tightness of the twin trombones of Alex Asher and Ryan Snow reminds of classic Skatalites, or Burning Spear’s peak-era band with the Burning Brass.

There are two versions of Tri Tro Tro here and they couldn’t be any more different: they’re basically two separate songs. Which is the coolest thing about dub – the first builds to a carefree Will Graefe guitar hook over the equally catchy bassline, the second begins as a new wave guitar song before the reggae riddim kicks in and morphs into a soukous tune. The third track, Neolithic, runs from a twin trombone hook to a wickedly catchy turnaround, wailing guitar giving way to the swoosh of the echoplex and then an unexpectedly balmy, jazzy interlude.

The best track here is the absolutely Lynchian We Will Begin Again with its noir trombones, creepy, lingering guitar and shapeshifting melody. Q Street drops the individual instruments in and out over an Ethiopian-flavored groove, while Public Option – another political reference  - centers its echoey orchestration around a moody minor groove and Madhu Siddappa’s hypnotically boomy snare drum. The final track, mixed expertly by Victor Rice, somebody who knows a thing or two about classic dub, is Single Payer, the most psychedelic, Black Ark-style plate here, the veteran ska and reggae producer having fun matching the bass and drums against the guitar and trombones and vice versa. The album release show is at Nublu at around midnight – you know how that place is – on Dec 13, and it’s free.

Edgy, Original Balkan Dub and Reggae from Kottarashky and the Rain Dogs

Balkan reggae has been done before by everybody from Gogol Bordello to Balkan Beat Box, but Sofia, Bulgaria’s Kottarashky & the Rain Dogs are different. Their recent album Demoni is a bracing mix of virtuosity and punk-inspired irreverence. Kottarashky, a.k.a. producer Nikola Gruev, assembled the project since he’d grown sick of dj sets. On some of the songs, you can definitely tell that they’ve been cut and pasted, although the deeper they go into dub, the less it matters. Gruev is obviously having a good time adding various woozy textures to tracks provided by guitarist/keyboarist Hristos Hadziganchev, clarinetist Aleksandar Dobrev, bassist Yordan Geshakov and drummer Atanas Popov. Occasional brass, strings, flute and accordion enhance the dark Eastern vibe.

They establish the trippy, sometimes scary mood right off the bat with Aman Aman, the clarinet trading eerie, shivery lines with the violin and eventually building to a psychedelic thicket of textures. The second track is a soul groove set to a trip-hop rhythm, sort of a Balkan Thunderball as the woozy synth, trumpet, funk bass, clarinet and then organ filter into and then out of the mix. Pancho Says works its way from gypsy punk to trippy modern gypsy jazz, while Begemot goes back to trip-hop, but more creepily.

Slavyanka Blues isn’t a blues; it’s a twisted, echoey dub waltz. The band keeps the sinister ambience going with Trans 5, a raw, lo-fi minor-key reggae tune with some cool contrasts between mysterioso clarinet and clattering percussion, rising with an ominous guitar solo. Ungroovie works the same terrain, but more weirdly, bluesy lead guitar trading off with gypsy clarinet: it’s about as far from Jamaican roots reggae as you can get, but at the same time it’s incredibly cool.

Babo works a killer Balkan bass clarinet groove for all it’s worth, while Put a Blessing On takes a surprisingly effective detour into new wave rock with reverbtoned Arp synth, clanky guitar and growling, trebly bass. It’s hard to keep track of everything going on in Blatoto – are those twin clarinets, or doubletracked guitars? Whatever the case, it finally builds to a burning crescendo with distorted guitars and pummeling drums. By contrast, Vlasti is the most psychedelic tune here, taking a rather haunting folk melody through the murky chambers of dub. The album winds up with the jaunty title track and its artfully arranged exchanges between the clarinet, accordion, synths and drums. This ought to catch on with the gypsy rock crowd as well as the reggae/stoner rock contingent. And those lucky people in Sofia get to see these guys live!

Rich Purist Psychedelic Soul/Rock Sounds from Damian Quiñones

Damian Quiñones y Su Conjunto’s new album Gumball Ma-Jumbo - streaming in its entirety online - is a masterpiece of tunesmithing, an intricate mix of oldschool late 60s style psychedelic soul, rock and pop spiced with salsa, luscious horn charts, bubbling keys and nasty guitars. Quiñones is the man on the fretboard, jangling, slashing and taking all sorts of solos that blend sunbaked psychedelia with a terse, bluesy edge: he doesn’t waste a note. Likewise, as ornate as his arrangements can be, those don’t waste notes either. It’s one of the best albums of 2012.

Interestingly, the opening track is a wickedly catchy oldschool roots reggae song, a style that Quiñones will only come back to once here, but he nails it, with swirly organ, melodica flourishes, echoey tremoloing guitar and a lush horn chart. He follows that with the only song that really references anything after, say, 1975; it’s an attempt to blend retro 90s and 60s Britpop and it doesn’t really work. But the track after that is a treat – Barrio, pulsing along on a slinky clave beat, juxtaposes Fania-era Puerto Rican soul with a burning powerpop chorus and a tense, suspenseful interlude featuring two basslines. After that, Quiñones takes a pulsing soul song and makes it funkier every time the verse comes around, driven by blazing horns and judiciously slashing guitar fills.

Flyers starts out skeletal but quickly brings in a heavier psychedelic soul vibe: Quiñones’ distorted wah solo over Edwin Canito Garcia’s raw, slinky bassline after the second chorus is one of the highlights of the album. After Laura Mulholland’s tumbling piano intro, Malachi hits a punchy, swaying Big Star groove, Quiñones’ long, searing solo taking the song doublespeed until the end, where he doubletracks another solo alongside it: the effect is intense to say the least. The band follows that with I Know That You That I, blending 60s soul with noir Orbison pop.

What might be the best song – and definitely the best lyric – is Recuredos de Inez, sung in Spanish. Another richly arranged roots reggae tune, it builds to a majestic, regretful, noirishly anthemic crescendo lit up by artfully arranged horns. Or, the best song here might be the unexpectedly sarcastic, dismissive One Trick Pony, funky soul building to a scorching chorus and a series of jagged solos panning between the left and right channels: “It’s hard to discuss where you’ve been with a shoeshine part-time attitude,” Quiñones snarls.

The rest of the album includes Ollie Ollie Oxen Free, a psychedelically funky number like vintage Tower of Power but with more of a guitar-fueled edge; Shadow in the Sun, early 60s noir pop as Arthur Lee might have done it – but with a disco beat – and French Tickler, a tango-rock epic. What links all this together is that Quiñones and his band never play a verse or chorus the same way twice. There’s always a cool addition or subtraction, a subtle accent or rumble from drummer Seth Johnson or percussionist Brian Higbie, or a swell from the brass: trumpeters Brian Baker and Geoffrey Hull and trombonist Gregorio Hernandez lock together and rise like a single mighty horn. It gets better with repeated listening. Watch this space for upcoming shows.

Israel Vibration: Ital and Vital in Central Park

“I’m in a mellow mellow mellow mellow mellow mood!” Cecil “Skelly” Spence of Israel Vibration insisted Sunday evening at Central Park Summerstage. He’d just sung an entire seventeen-song set with the ageless roots reggae band, standing on crutches and doing a nifty little dance a little earlier, and the rail-thin singer was still wired. Maybe it was all of the “brain food” that the band celebrated throughout their final song, Red Eyes. You know, the healing of the nation, found on the grave of King Solomon, yadda yadda. There was a lot of that wafting through the crowd, the arena slowly filling up as the clouds overhead kept the sun from baking the astroturf.

Israel Vibration released their first single, Why Worry – the warmly soul-tinged opening song from their set – in 1977, the trio of Spence, Lascelle “Wiss” Bulgin and the sorely missed Albert “Apple Gabriel” Craig having first joined their voices at a sanitarium for Jamaican youth stricken with polio. What’s just as heartwarming as their backstory at this point in time is that their songs, and their performance, are just as strong now as they were then. Craig’s place was taken by a couple of women singing harmonies who did double duty covering for Skelly and Wiss’ characteristically wavery voices, while the tremendous Roots Radics played inspired, terse, sometimes majestic tracks behind them. Flabba Holt doesn’t look very flabba these days, a lot closer in size to his tiny Steinberger bass, but his basslines were still fat and propulsive. The band’s excellent soul and blues-influenced guitarist didn’t play a single heavy metal lick all afternoon, their keyboardist switching expertly between a million perfectly chosen patches, from organ, to melodica, to accordion, along with the expected banks of phony, synthesized brass. And even that was a fair approximation of the real thing.

Israel Vibration’s songs don’t just pay lip service to the usual roots reggae tropes: these guys were there when Rastas in Jamaica were treated like young black and latino men are today in the Bronx and Brooklyn. Those songs’ edge, and bite, and inescapable social awareness reflect the struggles, physical and otherwise, that these musicians faced back when reggae was revolutionary music scorned by the upper classes. They followed their opening track with Feeling Irie, which turned into a pretty epic fail as a singalong. So Wiss took lead vocals on the bitter Mr. Consular Man, a chronicle of being grilled by suspicious immigration officials. They picked up the pace a little with another relatively recent minor-key number, Hard Road to Follow, then Skelly took over the mic for Ball of Fire, its warm, classic late 60s/early 70s vibe contrasting with its grim, apocalyptic lyrics. An even more recent song sent a tepidly received shout-out to all five boroughs of New York; they followed that with a sweeping version of their big 90s hit Jailhouse Rocking, complete with Arabic guitar licks and melodica keyboards.

Skelly sang another pair of warmly attractive songs with grim lyrics, Living on Borrowed Time and Back Staba. Wiss followed with their more pensive 1990 hit Far Away and then another Jailhouse Rocking track, Cool and Calm as Skelly scooted around the stage a little on his crutches. They evoked early Toots & the Maytals with another sarcastic if bubbly new song, My Master’s Will, a metaphorically loaded servant’s tale, following with the defiant Never Gonna Hurt Me Again and then Vultures. As they reached the end of the set, they let the vibe go more carefree with a full-length version of their biggest 1970s hit, The Same Song. This band reputedly slayed at Sumfest this year; much as a lot of the crowd, particularly the Jamaican contingent, had come out for a nostalgia fix, Israel Vibration are far, far away from turning into a nostalgia act like so many of their contemporaries.