The Slackers – The Slackers and Friends (Select Cuts)
September 2nd, 2003 by duck
A seven piece hailing from New York, The Slackers have assembled an all star cast to accompany them through ‘The Slackers and Friends’ (hence the title, dummy), which is apparently their seventh album. On board are Susan ‘Hurt So Good’ Cadogan, Ari Up of the Slits, ex-Lee Perry associates The Congos and even Glen Adams of the Upsetters and Doreen Schaffer of the Skatalites. With a cast of such stature, you could be forgiven for expecting a great deal from this record. In fact, for the most part the retro stylings of the album work very well. The Slackers are clearly adept reggae musicians, with a defiantly pop edge, and on the roots reggae of ″Mash Down Babylon″, the dub of ‘Schooling the Youth’ and the eighties dancehall of ‘Grabalicious Man’ they provide ample backing for the all star guests to strut their stuff. ‘Matey Exterminator’is great too; featuring Ari Up of the Slits it provides a sadly rare burst of individuality, with dreamy production and a unique vocal delivery really lifting the track above the norm. Then the Slackers follow this high point with ‘Runnning From Safety’ which looks so far back into Jamaican music history that it almost stumbles back into the American R & B that fathered the JA style in the first place (although the couplet ″Day breaks once more/I wake up on someone’s floor″ raised a chuckle).
Unfortunately ‘Running From Safety’ illustrates the shortcomings of the LP perfectly. The problem isn’t the music per se – as mentioned it’s chirpy, well played and in the main, well produced. The problem is that whilst you can imagine a great night out enjoying The Slackers live show, their insistence on gazing at reggae’s rear view mirror, and the magpie mixture of styles they play doesn’t seem to translate to an album quite so well. None of the guests seem to have put in a lifetime best performance, and for every style The Slackers tackle there must be literally hundreds of records of an equal quality which were made when the respective style was the current big thing in Kingston Town. As such, ‘The Slackers and Friends’ is unlikely to set the world alight for anyone with even a passing interest in Jamaican music.
In case you hadn’t already reached the same conclusion as I did by the end of the album, The Slackers include a couple of bonus tracks. The first of these is a version on ‘I Chase the Devil’ by Max Romeo, which just rolls over and begs the question; ″If I’m going to buy a reggae record today, shall I buy ‘The Slackers and Friends″? Or Max Romeo’s ‘War In a Babylon’?″ (on which ″I Chase the Devil″ features). Sadly although ‘The Slackers and Friends’ is all good fun, and probably sells well at their gigs, there should only be one answer to that question. And if you don’t fancy ″War in a Babylon″, well, there are a lot of other reggae re-releases out there, and a lot of them are far better, more individual works than this album. Ultimately ‘The Slackers and Friends″ joins the endless ranks of pleasant but nevertheless average reggae records rather than ever threatening to blaze its own trail large across the skyline.
Duck
