The Specials - Protest Songs 1924 – 2012 (2021) [Official Digital Download 24/96]

Waylaid by writers’ block and Covid, the Specials have been unable to make their planned Jamaican reggae follow-up to 2019’s Encore. So they’ve recorded some covers instead, shapeshifting through blues, folk, country and rock. It’s odd that most of the songs are American, when this band are so good at delineating a particularly British experience. And your definition of a protest song may be very different from theirs.

It doesn’t matter. The Specials have always balanced calls to action with jaundiced observation; intertwined the personal and political. For every Racist Friend, a Ghost Town. Their take on Frank Zappa’s tartly cynical Trouble Every Day works surprisingly well alongside the impassioned exhilaration of Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Us Around. Terry Hall delivers a huskily seductive reading of Leonard Cohen’s bleak, hard-won aphorisms on Everybody Knows, while Hannah Hu shines through an imaginative rework of Talking Heads’ Listening Wind. There’s the odd misstep – a pounding version of the Staples Singers’ delicately rousing Freedom Highway will sound far better live – but the raw immediacy of Lynval Golding’s vocals on Get Up, Stand Up is as powerful and stirring as his BLM monologue on Encore.

TRACKLIST

1. The Specials - Freedom Highway
2. The Specials - Everybody Knows
3. The Specials - I Don't Mind Failing In This World
4. The Specials - Black, Brown And White
5. The Specials - Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Us Around
6. The Specials - Fuck All The Perfect People
7. The Specials - My Next Door Neighbor
8. The Specials - Trouble Every Day
9. The Specials - Listening Wind
10. The Specials - I Live In A City
11. The Specials - Soldiers Who Want To Be Heroes
12. The Specials - Get Up, Stand Up
13. The Specials - The Lunatics (Live at Coventry Cathedral, July 2019)
14. The Specials - We Sell Hope (Live at Coventry Cathedral, July 2019)



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