Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

We are taught, quite rightly, as a child to not judge a book by its cover, but as we get older, more in tune to the universe, we cannot help in the field of art to gaze upon an album, a novel, a painting, and define it to our aesthetic enjoyment and be more likely to purchase the offering by the creative because of the way the cover stands out.

We are intelligent enough to understand the dichotomy, because not everything is set in stone, we are allowed to change and alter our perception because of the crucial brilliance that runs through our minds, the chemical reaction to beauty in all its wonderous choice and bounty. It is that equation, that sense of Human Algebra that is complex, sometimes cruel, often difficult to navigate, but never not steeped in its own history and reflection of its past, is the difference being set down when we see the truth of the picture and investigate the meaning beneath.

The Selecter are arguably the epitome of their craft, the sense of beguiling music mixed swiftly and with grace that makes the lyrics, often written with a groove of melancholy, even justified anger, catchy, infectious, daringly fruitful. It is the message of algebra itself, the intricate symbolic equation that many routinely miss and cannot fathom that drives the emotion to be found as the sublime Pauline Black, Arthur ‘Gaps’ Hendrickson, Charles ‘Aitch’ Bembridge, John Robertson, Lee Horsely, Andy Pearson and Neil Skeete all strive and succeed in capturing the mood of the last few years in their own indomitable style.

Through tracks and songs of rebellion, the search for justice, the anger that attacks institutional racism, of the falseness of prophets who sit in their comfortable homes and espouse political thought that is brought on by wanting to appear woke but who cannot understand the belief behind it. The Selecter pound away with fists and a heart made of belief, and as songs such as Boxing Clever, the enormous fire of the soul that inhabits Stay Rebel, Parade The Clown, Armchair Guevara, Scandalous, and Not In Love With Love break the walls of comfort, so too does the music inflame the soul, the passion of the divine and the glorious.

Human Algebra is an album of sheer intensity but fuelled by that one element that stands above all others, love; and it is that love that the group once more deliver brilliance.

Ian D. Hall