Home
The Aggrolites come bouncing back onto the reggae world’s radar this month with the release of their fourth studio album, highly originally named “IV”. This is their third release off Hellcat Records, working for whom they have also been generous enough to provide the backing music for Tim Armstrong’s solo album “A Poets Life” a couple of years back.
IV follows The Aggrolites tradition of getting as much music onto one CD as possible, as they have managed to squeeze 75 minutes and 18 seconds of music onto the standard 80 minute CD. Considering the average album length for most bands would be a (comparatively paltry) 45-50 minutes, you are getting a lot of music for your money. The down side to this is that across the 21 tracks on the album there is simply not enough variety to make this a compelling record to listen to. Listening to it in the car on the way to work, you can hear song after song that sounds very similar to one you heard a short while before.
This is not to say there aren’t any ‘gems’ on the record – far from it. The opening track, Firecracker, is quite a jaunty number – and a bit of a jangly open different to that you would expect from hearing The Aggrolites previous work. This is (unsurprisingly) followed by track two, What A Complex, which slows it down a bit and gets that little bit more soulful. However, these two tracks effectively represent a good two thirds of the album to me, as a lot of the rest of it sounds quite like one or the other.
If you think back to Tim Armstrong’s album A Poets Life, you can see that with a bit of direction, this band can definitely do some fine work – but without the influence of a pro from outside the group, The Aggrolites are sadly lacking slightly in the creativity department. To my ears, IV sounds fairly similar to the bands previous release in 2007, Reggae Hit L.A., despite the couple of lineup changes the band have had since the release of that album (the bassist J. Bonner quit the group in August ’07, only for his replacement David Fuentes to die in late September of that year – the new bassist is Jeff Roffredo, formerly of Tiger Army).
Other than the couple of tracks mentioned above, the remaining highlights for me would be Runnin’ Strong (a throaty, powerful skank-fest of a song), Soul Gathering (a purely musical adventure, with no vocals – just a bouncing odyssey of synthetic harmonies and hooks) and the closing track, It’s Gonna Be OK. The album finishes on a brilliant mellow and reflective number that you just can’t keep from nodding along to. Indeed, a lot of the album has at the very least that effect on you – as background music that you aren’t really listening to or focussing on, I think it’s perfect. But if you’re looking for something to get you dancing, or even in the mood for dancing, then this album is not the one for you.
SkaMutiny Rating: 2/5
Andy
Last edited by Al on Fri Jun 19, 2009 8:35 pm; edited 1 time in total (Reason for editing : Broken URL link.)
