AR: Hail H.I.M.

Burning Spear - Hail H.I.M. (1980)

The path from my fandom of GPGDS to the classic roots reggae of Burning Spear is a short one, but I actually acquired this album because I happened to hear an ear-catching review of 2009's Grammy-winning Jah is Real on NPR* - I decided to check out the back catalog. Hail H.I.M. is the fifth in a series of Burning Spear's 1975-1980 masterpieces and an album that by all accounts served to put the final touches of the defiition of roots reggae. It's on the dark end of the bunch, with the buzzing, classicly late '70s synths (to these Grateful Dead-raised ears) and jazzed up horns providing a foreboding murk for most of the album that sits well upon-a polyrhythmic, trance-inducing groove. Perhaps the most striking thing at play in this album is the multitude of instruments and lines present on a simple-sounding recording - because of the familiarity of the basic reggae beat, it's easy not to pay attention and assume there's just some guitar/synth upbeats against the bass and drums background, but there are many interweaving lines here, in the bass, guitar, drums, and vocals, that stand out on close-listening.

* - This, coincidentally, was close to the time that the SNL short "Are You There Jah? It's Me, Ross Trent" came out, making me feel at least somewhat poseur-ish in my white-boy classic rasta investigations.

The range of the album is impressive, too. As stated, most of it is a pervasive, sinister hypnosis, but that varies from the borderline dissonant wail of "Road Foggy" to the bright, more classic reggae sounds of "Columbus" and "African Teacher." The middle ground is great, too - the title track and "African Postman" are the best samples of the general sound of the album, one's that consistent across the disc and consistently mesmerizing. Content-wise, it's (and yes, go ahead and say, "well, duh") deeply spiritual protest music - both Jamaica and the sought repatriation to Africa were in various states of bloodshed at the time, and the content is very poetically concise accounts of these troubles and yearning for their resolution. It's delivered laconically and serves to raise the mystique of the album rather than render it pleading, too-obvious protest music.

If you're seeking the one sentence sum up, it's a consistently good set of dark, multi-instrumental, expertly layered reggae groove jams. This is the end run of some of the original sounds that have been aped mercilessly by several strands of popular music; there's the readily apparent authenticity that is a huge amount of the power of seeking out these musical "roots," so to speak. It's an acquired taste - not a huge amount of hookage hear - and definitely requires an interest in the power of the repetitive, as I'm sure casual listening would leave one with a sense of the samey. But for jazzed out, proggy roots reggae, this is the bar setter, and an excellent discwide spread of rhytmically-induced mind-melt.

Status: Recommended (solid)
Nyet's Fave: "Road Foggy"