Easy Star All-Stars - Radiodread [review]

I started writing this review in the Virgin Megastore café – standing. That is how urgent I felt it was to get my opinions down on Radiodread, the latest rock/reggae fusion experiment from the Easy Star All-Stars.

I felt as if I had discovered one of those secrets that are just too good to keep to myself. The ones I feel the need to run out and publicize.

Not since the infamous Space Monkeys vs. Gorillaz album Laika Come Home had I felt so immediately drawn to an experimental dub album. It took only three tracks at the record store listening station to convince me that it was necessary to cough-up the funds and take this new disk home.

But it was hardly a secret right?

For months before its release I had heard of how the normally aloof Thom Yorke had expressed appreciation for the album; that the Easy Star All-Stars were acclaimed for their previous release Dub Side Of The Moon (which one Rolling Stone reviewer deemed “pretty cool”); and that the accompaniment for the album would be the antithesis of typical Radiohead productions, heavy on the live instrumentation and light on the electronics.

Besides, the album was to feature reggae’s greatest living performers covering Radiohead’s OK Computer. What in heaven’s name could go wrong with that?

Then I got home and listened the album again, and again. And the more I listened, the more my once glowing review lost its lustre. I soon realized that my initial exuberance was premature, for on the most part the album is good, but not great.

“Great” would mean additional appearances by reggae stalwarts such as Mutabaruka or Gregory Isaacs, instead of the relatively unknown Menny More and the known-but-only-mildly-reggae Citizen Cope.

For the album to be truly magnificent it would mean diverting away from the Easy Star All-Stars formula of keeping OK Computer’s musical arrangement and merely adding a bass-heavy guitar line and a piercing horn section; as was achieved on Electioneering featuring Morgan Heritage.

“Greatness” exceeds being heavy-handed on the reverb and echo chamber controls-trols-trols-trols like an early evening sound system operator.

Radiodread does come close to greatness though.

The appearances by Horace Andy (who famously worked previously with Massive Attack), Sugar Minott and Frankie Paul are superb. And Toots and the Maytals transform Let Down into a lock-shaking, leg-skanking jam.

The album’s lesser-known featured ‘all-star’ performers, such as Junior Jazz, Tamar-kali, and Skelly Vibe, add unwanted modernity and youth to an album that’s a cover of another album by one of the most forward-thinking bands of our time. If anything these additions take away from the genuine quirkiness I had anticipated—according to one account the more senior singers had a hard time embracing Yorke’s lyrics—of an album touted as a sonic culture clash.

Regardless, I still like the album. Since I’ve bought the disc I’ve listened to track five innumerable times, allowing Toots and the Maytals to take me to a smoky, late seventies bar in an urban Kingston shanty, a place I doubt Radiohead had envisioned when composing the song.

I have also risked disturbing the neighbors by blasting the dubwise tunes at a ridiculously high volume late into the New York night.

In searching for a way to express the vibe of the album, I kept coming back to a little known Bob Marley track released on an album many years before this one. “Kinky reggae,” sings Bob on the song that carries the same name. “Kinky reggae, uh! Kinky reggae, now take it or leave it.”

The new Easy Star All-Stars release Radiodread is kinky reggae indeed.

+ also published on the PixelSurgeon website