Pitchfork

For the last few years, dancehall has been an embarrassment of riches. Lightspeed handclaps, ravey lazer-bleep synths, digital Bollywood sitars, the Cure's "Close to Me"-- dancehall has absorbed all this stuff and turned it into irresistible, joyous, beautiful pop music. So when old-school one-drop beats came back into vogue in the past year, it seemed like the end of a ridiculously fertile period.

But "Welcome to Jamrock" is everything we loved about reggae in the first place: an obliteratingly huge, spacey bass, echoes of chopped-up guitars floating ominously, drums slamming through chest cavities, airhorns and sirens all over the track, a lonely ghost piano moaning over the outro. The song's lyrics take an old conceit (you will get fucked up in my neighborhood) and then give it an edge of despair and fury by turning it political on the second verse: "To see the sufferation sicken me/ Them suit no fit me, to win an election they trick me/ And they don't do nothing at all." And then there's that vocal. Damien Marley sounds like he eats white-hot gravel for breakfast every morning and brushes his teeth with lava, but occasionally he lets it turn into a gorgeous coo for just a few syllables at the end of a few lines before turning back into fire and brimstone. I hope I don't go to hell for saying it, but I like "Welcome to Jamrock" as much as anything Marley's father ever did.

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