The melting together of disparate genres has always made for some great listening. Just look at any artist currently being touted as “the next big thing.” These genre collisions could come in the form of any number of clashing stylistic choices. This would include Johnny Cash covering Nine Inch Nails and Danzig as much as Beck combining hip hop beats with a stream of consciousness indie rock flow.
Newport group Skindred is a new addition to the world of genre hopping acts, melding together metal, punk and ragga into an almost cohesive package. The most common problem with groups that rely on their eclectic musical vocabularies to create an intriguing sound is that albums wind up sounding patchy and uneven. Skindred’s debut album, Babylon, is no exception, providing half an album’s worth of hot tracks and interesting interludes and half a disc of mosh pit filler.
Skindred draws most heavily from Ozzfest-style metal, with vocalist Benji Webb’s frequent sub-vocal growling and cookie cutter guitar riffs that could easily have appeared on any early Pantera album. Where Skindred distinguishes itself as something special is with Webb’s ragga ranting (sounding like a cross between Bad Brains and Bounty Killa) and Dirty Arya percussive assault, which mixes the fury of drum and bass with some heavy metal crunch. This fuels tracks like “Set it Off,” “Tears” (which comes off with a pop-radio-ready hook and some of the disc’s best guitar work) and the album’s brightest party anthem cut, “Pressure.” Webb’s vocal prowess took time to mold, building up after years of cutting dub plates, singing with various sound systems across the UK and working with acclaimed dub artists like Mad Scientist.
The album kicks off with a weird/funky sample-driven dubbed-out intro and quickly flips itself into the metal mosher, “Nobody.” The track is basically about making the music that Skindred makes, with Webb singing, “Blend up the Ragga metal punk hip-hop / Unity sound killer groove nonstop.” It seems like Skindred wanted to help out its listeners with a list of their sampled genres and comes off as basic as best, but overall “Nobody” turns out a fun, boastful pit anthem, perfect for a live romping.
“Pressure” is Skindred’s knockout punch, and the group wisely places it near the album’s starting point (unfortunately there isn’t an equal track near to the end of the album, and the last few songs wilt after Babylon‘s forceful opening) to rile up listeners. Webb’s dual vox drive a tuneful attack about sound system warfare, a classic reggae theme focused on the battles between sound systems in which DJs and MCs would set up their stereo systems across from opposing outfits and rock the latest dub and rock steady tracks, trying to outdo and out-profit each other. Here the band locks up tight as the musicians “nice up the metal.”
“Selector” and “Start First” both collide on point in a hot dance hall slam, only pulled down momentarily by a few scream/growl metal overindulgences. But “Selector’s” reverse record pulls sound utterly killer when mashed against a metal backdrop.
“Bruises” is the disc’s first flailing misstep as nu-metal style takes precedence over Skindred’s better tendencies. The track emerges feeling tired before it’s halfway through. The group’s ragga (a musical category defined in Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton’s historical study of the disc jockey, “Last Night a DJ Saved My Life” as “the hard electronic style of reggae…exactly analogous with house or techno: traditional musical forms reconstructed on synthesizers and drum machines”) influence shines the brightest on “Set it Off.” The song’s rousing chorus of “Kill them with the rhythm cos we come to set it off,” embodies the music’s most enjoyable aspects and the bouncing artillery of sound system culture. (For listeners looking for some straightforward ragga, check out Kid 606’s smattering of stunners across most of his recent releases and Wayne Smith’s original ragga tracks, most notably “Under Mi Sleng Teng”).
“Firing the Love” (which suffers from some horrible mixing choices with regards to Webb’s vocal parts) and “World Domination” come off as metal practice pieces, even with the latter’s earnest attempt at socio-political awareness. Unfortunately, lyrics like “Biological hazards causing world deterioration / Adding to pollution environmental situation / Chemical reaction could reduce the population” seem somewhat trite and unstudied when compared to the song’s intense subject matter.
The group accomplishes a smooth slow down moment with “The Fear.” Any self-declared metal act that can lay down an earnest acoustic track like this one (with the fun-sensitive urging, “We no fear rude boy get out of here / With your bully tactics you disappear / We don’t fear rude gal get out of here / With you bad gal business, disappear.”) could have a chance at releasing a perfectly rounded-out package on subsequent attempts. But the flavor is all too quickly soured by the generic (at least for a group with as much potential as Skindred) sounds of “Babylon” and “The Beginning of Sorrows.”
Overall, Babylon offers a fresh slice of musical sweetness for metal heads stuck on the repetitive sounds of hard rock radio, but Skindred is now in place to record a sophomore album that could be an important step in expanding heavy metal’s horizons in the direction of hot island vibes.
Grade: B
