But on the sad, gorgeous Nas duet "Road to Zion", his voice is a weary, lonely sigh reminiscent of Horace Andy. On "Beautiful", he namechecks his father alongside the smooth dancehall loverman Super Cat, and in his lighter moments, Marley sounds strikingly like the latter. 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. Refreshingly, Marley sounds very little like his father. 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. The expert sex jam "All Night" has a rolling throwback beat that could've come from Marley Marl in his prime. 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 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. 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.
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March 2023
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