Pitchfork

It would've made sense for Marley to attempt to recreate the song's blazing old-school one-drop roots fury throughout the album, but he opts instead to veer all over the musical map with about half the album barely sounding like reggae. The album's opener, "Confrontation", finds Marley in full-on prophet mode, singing, "Any day, revolution might erupt/ And the skies over Kingston lighten up." It seems like a fitting sequel to "Jamrock", except that it trades in that song's rootsy skank for synthetic martial drums and ominous, sawing soundtrack strings. Other tracks draw on the slick breakbeats and sampled funk-guitar stabs of late-80s new jack swing; it's not much of a surprise when Bobby Brown turns up halfway through the album. The expert sex jam "All Night" has a rolling throwback beat that could've come from Marley Marl in his prime. A handful of other songs are simply straight-up dancehall, weird coming from the guy who is supposedly at the forefront of reggae's move away from ragga; "Hey Girl" even sounds something like a laid-back take on T.O.K. (This is a good thing.)

Refreshingly, Marley sounds very little like his father. He's got a strained, abrasive voice with very little in common with Bob's honeyed coo, and his Jamaican accent is so deep and thick that it's often hard for American ears to tell what he's saying. On "Beautiful", he namechecks his father alongside the smooth dancehall loverman Super Cat, and in his lighter moments, Marley sounds strikingly like the latter. But on the sad, gorgeous Nas duet "Road to Zion", his voice is a weary, lonely sigh reminiscent of Horace Andy. Marley only recalls his father once on "We're Gonna Make It", a lush, burbling, melodic old-school reggae track, a style that Marley simply can't do anywhere near as well as his father. Much more powerful is "Move!", a song that samples his father's "Exodus", adding rushing drums and quick-tongue chatting that become increasingly passionate and frantic as the song progresses. When the drums drop out and Bob's voice comes in on the chorus, it's breathtaking.

But despite all its great moments, Jamrock doesn't hold together as an album; its constant stylistic switch-ups keep it from ever building into a whole. The missteps on the album are especially glaring. The Bobby Brown collaboration "Beautiful" is ruined by a cheesed-out smooth-jazz session-musician saxophone, while "Pimpa's Paradise" enlists the Roots' Black Thought for a boring, condescending woman-gone-astray lament. "For the Babies" is a pretty-enough ballad with an orientalist synth riff, but its lyrics are some pro-life bullshit that Pat Robertson would probably approve. And then there's the title track, a song so great that it dwarfs the rest of the album. Marley will be lucky if he ever equals it.