Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10

You can’t keep a good genre down for long. Like Progressive Rock which seemed to die a death in the late seventies, aside from a wonderful brief renaissance due to a certain band in the 1980s, Blues which collapsed under its own weight and almost near corpulent excess and the many predicted passing of Heavy Metal which like the late Christopher Lee in many of his outings as Dracula, comes back to enthuse a new generation with its addictive bite; so to have many impatient scribes long lamented over the lack of Ska in the last decade.

What once was will always be again, History, like Time is an animal that never lets go and dares Humanity to believe its own delusion that it has moved on from everything that went before it. For Ska never went away, live it has still the beating heart of the street wrapped tightly around its very soul, protecting the music with rhythm and sensitivity. It is just in the album stakes it hasn’t had the output in which to grab the naked thought of the British public, that is apart from the ever graceful, cool thoughts and heat of The Selecter. Once more this is born out in the latest album by the band, the marvellously delivered Subculture.

Modern society in many ways resembles far too much that in which led to the divisions and break down that accompanied Britain’s streets in the 1970s and ‘80s. The word of the elite few is taken far too much as gospel and those coming up behind, clinging on the moth eaten coat-tails seem to disregard that there is true upset and rage festering in the hearts of the young and disenfranchised.

Trust The Selecter, trust in Pauline Black to capture this mood in the band’s latest offering but also with the surprise element attached to it that it is full of songs that don’t have the full on rage attached to them as for example the terrific Too Much Pressure from the band’s unique discography. These songs are more subtle, passionately delicate and perhaps living in the realisation that not everything can be solved with anger but that the velvet glove hiding the iron fist  is a much more effective weapon to use when dealing with lyrics that create deep and resonating thought.

Tracks such as It Never Worked Out, the splendid Open Goal, Stone Cold Sober, Still I Rise and the outstanding cover of Because The Night all beat with a heart of sincerity and social reality. It is the exacting nature of life, the challenging and testing times for the downcast and those riddled by the sounds of the selfish and greedy, in which greatness comes over the hill, perhaps unexpectedly, and gives the order in which to fight back; not with sticks and stones and missiles but with carefully chosen words and demanding questions.

For The Selecter, those words, that lyrical language of hope and self expression make Subculture an album in which to be reckoned with.

Ian D. Hall