Skindred’s eighth album begins with the sort of sonic blast you’d expect from a band making their debut on Earache Records, a label synonymous with noisy acts such as horror punks Misfits or Singaporean grindcore group Wormrot. Opener Our Religion sounds like a ragga Metallica and – sci-fi effects aside – is the sort of riff-laden festival-friendly anthem that has earned the Wales four-piece a hefty following at the heavier end of British music.
Within minutes, however, at the opposite end of the musical spectrum comes LOVE (Smile Please), a gloriously sunny banger just perfect for blasting out at barbecues, from open-topped cars and at Notting Hill carnival. With its skanking beat, parping horns and joyful, earworm lyrics (“I’ve got sunshine when it’s raining / I’ve got blessing when it’s pouring”), it’s a classic summer anthem in the lineage of the Piranhas’ cover of Tom Hark, Aswad’s crossover smash Don’t Turn Around or Bad Manners’ barmily infectious ska revival hits. It beggars belief that two such disparate songs can appear minutes apart on the same album, but it isn’t untypical of this band who debuted the bouncy anthem at last year’s Download metal festival yet have topped the US reggae charts.
Skindred are very much made in the image of colourful 56-year-old frontman Benji Webbe, whose appearance – dreadlocks, leather, studded sunglasses, medallions and pink jumpsuits – reflects an eclectic mindset. Growing up in Newport, Wales, the son of a Windrush-generation father and a mother from Cardiff of Philadelphian heritage, he was surrounded by reggae, T Rex, Slade, the Jackson 5, David Bowie and his mum’s West Side Story soundtrack – and didn’t see any differences between them. Meanwhile his older brother was a Rastafarian in a rock band. After starting out in Newport rockers Dub War (whom he has recently been fronting again), Webbe formed Skindred in 1998 with a vision of a genre-busting multicultural band following the blueprint of the Specials.
He’s an inimitable character who listens to Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra and Sleaford Mods, and enjoys teasing the metal press by comparing the Sex Pistols to Mozart (“the punk rocker of his time”). His mission is to “bring people together” although his description of Skindred as “ragga metal” doesn’t always do justice to a wide-reaching sound that spans punk, metal, reggae, pop-rock, hip-hop, electronica and dancehall.
On Smile they’ve taken care to include enough heavy riffola and crunching rhythms to please the fanbase, including hurtling moshpit-friendly anthems such as Set Fazers and Unstoppable. But after that all bets are off, as they push at the outer limits of what a Kerrang! and Metal Hammer-favoured band can get away with.
Life That’s Free finds Nothing But Thieves’ producer Julian Emery’s pop production and atmospherics blending with Webbe’s gruff delivery to suggest an improbable spectacle of Shaggy fronting a drum’n’bass act (but much better than that sounds). Meanwhile, the delightful This Appointed Love is – unfeasibly – lovers rock with rock guitars. It’s not hard to imagine the animated studio conversation when someone decided that the skilfully epic pop-ragga-metal protest song Black Stars needed a children’s choir for the chorus, but this particularly unlikely handbrake turn works brilliantly.
Co-founding bassist Daniel Pugsley, the ZZ Top-bearded guitarist Mikey Demus, and formidable drummer Arya Goggin brew up a storm whatever the genre, while Webbe doesn’t see contradictions – perhaps there aren’t any – between gruffly hurling political soundbites (“The real criminal is in the White House / The real criminal is in Downing Street”) and singing sweetly lilting reggae songs in praise of motherhood (the touching Mama).
His band’s level of craft, and his own joie de vivre, mean he can pull off such moves. Even sepsis and having his throat slashed in a drink-fuelled street attack haven’t dampened his enthusiasm for life. (It says much about his character that when his assailant soberly approached him to apologise after she got out of prison, he told her he had forgiven her and was glad she’d learned from it.) Even potentially darker tracks, such as Addicted or the hip-hop/metal crossover Gimme That Boom, sound fairly uplifting. The latter song is about entitlement, inspired by an encounter when someone doorstepped Webbe for a photo: “I don’t care what you got, just gimme that boom boom boom!”
Whether Smile is or isn’t the huge crossover album they’re surely capable of, it will certainly broaden Skindred’s already wide constituency. For the more casual listener, they’re a musical Groucho Marx: if you don’t like some of their ideas, they have other ones.
This week Dave listened to
Futuris: Arrival of the Giants
Early hours Radio 3 led me to this terrifically hypnotic sample collage from the Cape Town artist’s Suns of Negus album, inspired by an urban soundscape.
