Magnificent dub album out originally on the Senrab label in 1976, when Lloyd Barnes was joined at the desk spars by Prince Douglas and Jah Upton. The selection commemorates a series of brilliant sevens and twelves on labels like City Line and Wackies, and sister labels like Upton, Versatile, and Munchie Jackson's Earth imprint. Core rhythm tracks from Jamaica - Treasure Isle mostly, and then mixed by Tubby - had been worked over at the Sounds Unlimited studio on E 24th Street in Manhattan. Baba Leslie's Black Horns next piece to Wayne Jarrett's African Woman is spun out of the opening track, the Love Joys voices swirl like genies in the stunning twin mixes of Disco Reggae and the track Dub Unlimited is John Clarke's Pollution (Unlimited Dub dubs singjay coverage of the Ali-Frazier Thriller In Manilla); Bullwackies Revenge is a version of the Chin Chow rhythm, a tribute to the restaurant next door; the Chosen Brothers' Talk To The Father is represented too, the details run on and on - an all-time great dub LP! (Phonica)
After leaving the Wailers behind, Bunny Wailer (born Neville Livingston) wasted no time establishing himself as a highly original and visionary singer and songwriter on his own. His solo debut remains one of the most extraordinary albums of the roots period, a complex but instantly attractive and occasionally heartbreaking record that never rises above a whisper in tone but packs as much political and spiritual wallop as the best of Bob Marley's work. Critics have been praising this album for more than 25 years, and they generally (and quite rightly) focus on the quality of such songs as the quietly ferocious "Fighting Against Conviction" (aka "Battering Down Sentence"), the classic repatriation anthem "Dreamland," and the apocalyptic "Amagideon," but the song that pulls you into Bunny Wailer's magical web of mystical Rastafarianism is the first one, in which Wailer recalls being warned by his mother to avoid Rastas ("even the lions fear him") and then describes his eventual conversion, all in a tone of infinite gentleness and sadness at the hardhearted blindness of Babylon. Are there missteps? Maybe one or two: The bluesy "Oppressed Song" never quite gets off the ground, for example. But taken as a whole, Blackheart Man is an astounding achievement by an artist who was, at the time, only at the beginning of what would be a distinguished career.
Stevie Wonder - 1976 - Songs In The Key Of Life (Flac)
Songs in the Key of Life was Stevie Wonder's longest, most ambitious collection of songs, a two-LP (plus accompanying EP) set that -- just as the title promised -- touched on nearly every issue under the sun, and did it all with ambitious (even for him), wide-ranging arrangements and some of the best performances of Wonder's career. The opening "Love's in Need of Love Today" and "Have a Talk with God" are curiously subdued, but Stevie soon kicks into gear with "Village Ghetto Land," a fierce exposé of ghetto neglect set to a satirical Baroque synthesizer. Hot on its heels comes the torrid fusion jam "Contusion," a big, brassy hit tribute to the recently departed Duke Ellington in "Sir Duke," and (another hit, this one a Grammy winner as well) the bumping poem to his childhood, "I Wish." Though they didn't necessarily appear in order, Songs in the Key of Life contains nearly a full album on love and relationships, along with another full album on issues social and spiritual. Fans of the love album Talking Book can marvel that he sets the bar even higher here, with brilliant material like the tenderly cathartic and gloriously redemptive "Joy Inside My Tears," the two-part, smooth-and-rough "Ordinary Pain," the bitterly ironic "All Day Sucker," or another classic heartbreaker, "Summer Soft." Those inclined toward Stevie Wonder the social-issues artist had quite a few songs to focus on as well: "Black Man" was a Bicentennial school lesson on remembering the vastly different people who helped build America; "Pastime Paradise" examined the plight of those who live in the past and have little hope for the future; "Village Ghetto Land" brought listeners to a nightmare of urban wasteland; and "Saturn" found Stevie questioning his kinship with the rest of humanity and amusingly imagining paradise as a residency on a distant planet. If all this sounds overwhelming, it is; Stevie Wonder had talent to spare during the mid-'70s, and instead of letting the reserve trickle out during the rest of the decade, he let it all go with one massive burst. (AllMusic)
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