Review Summary: Cause a fuss..
By 1979, Jerry Dammers had finished flailing through music fashion personas, ditching his Mod and flower child proclivities and turning into a toothless skinhead, one who would lay down the first songs that soon enough would give birth to checkered wonders The Specials. His subsequent start-up of 2-Tone Records would unexpectedly kick off an explosive revival of ska in England, and on a lesser level, the world. Along with Madness and Bad Manners, The Selecter rounded off 2-tone’s second squadron, headed up by the genre’s vanguards, The Specials and The Beat.
Compared to The Beat’s Lionel Martin and his searing sax fireworks, or The Specials’ raw punk and dub slants, The Selecter were a leaner, simpler outfit, splicing guitars and horns into songs that were primarily carried by roiling organs and a driving bass. Though their music challenged decidedly less boundaries, lead singer Pauline Black was the ace up the band’s sleeve. Her trilling soprano and an undeniably sexy presence softened the edges of where skinhead and punk cultures could flock to, still fresh and reeling from the gaping vacuum left in the post-Sex Pistols age. The early 80’s also saw Black become the poster-girl for London’s street fashion. Decked out in Harrington jackets, pork pie hats, skinny ties and combat boots, 2-tone kids looked cleaner and less ***ed-off than punks, and aside from lyrics that occasionally lost subtlety and tumbled into politico rants, their music stuck close to the original Caribbean ska formula - uplifting protest songs.
Three Minute Hero, one of the band’s staples kicks off
Too Much Pressure, and the album proceeds to sprint through one hooky rave-up after another, barely losing steam through its forty-minute run.
Missing Words is a gem, and one of the best songs to have come out of that frenzied revival. Showing Black’s affectations of the new-wave scene, which was only in its budding stages at the time, the song sees her marry ska’s harmonies with the kind of strong euphonies new-wave’s dancier material favoured.
Danger is similarly dazzling, swaying effortlessly between a throbbing Hammond, cracking guitar-work and an infectious sing-along hook.
They Make Me Mad’s sudden tempo shifts and the title tracks’ male-female dictum interplay all capture 2-tone emblematic angles. Underneath all the thrashing it was doing against early Thatcherisms, it was music to bop and bob to.
A superfluous cover of Justin Hinds and The Dominoes’ old ska standard
Carry Go Bring Home, and an overtly kitschy take on
James Bond sag the album’s second half somewhat, but never enough to trip up flow.
By 1981, a mere year later, their burgeoning new romantic tendencies would start sweeping over The Selecter’s albums, with arrangements growing thicker and more elegant and melodic, and Black’s singing leaning more toward Debbie Harry-like ragged crooning than that wild 2-tone yowl. While this genre-blending never managed to clip the band’s quality, in the following years, their output would lose a lot of the bite and ecstatic up-thrust that propelled their work, ditching it for songs that at times bordered on 80’s balladry. But
Too Much Pressure’s significance remains, an essential document of music that sieved fermenting social unrest through songs as agitated as they were captivating.
