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Mr. Anonymous - Mr. Anonymous
- Jeep MacNichol, drummer for The Samples during their most prolific period, set out to gather as many of his reggae heroes as he could on one album. For those unfamiliar The Samples are a group who are bigger successes on the road than they are in the record store, their sound is an amalgamation of jam rock (ala the Grateful Dead) and more straight-ahead modern-rock tendencies. If you’re unsure of how there’s a connection between a drummer for a jam-rock band and the reggae/dance-hall legends MacNichol chased down for this album, well, just catch a show of each scene and you’ll figure it out.
Herbal remedies aside, MacNichol described his aspirations for this album as his attempt to make the ‘"ultimate chill vibe" CD with acoustic guitars and dancehall rhythms.’ To make the ‘ultimate’ anything is always a fairly heady aspiration, any by over-qualifying your statement with even more details you make your achievement even easier to pick apart and see how close (or far) the statement stands from the achievement. While I would never call this album the ‘ultimate’ anything; it is a very solid album with a vast quantity of merit.
The album starts out extremely strong with the relaxed roll of ‘Mr. Anonymous’ playing into the upbeat ballad ‘Sexy’ before ‘Shylean’ aggressively takes control with Bounty Killer on the mic. The problem with such a varied, and standout combination of tracks to open an album is the inevitable fall-off that follows those tracks. Though the album does pick up again later on, check out ‘Player Hater,’ it’s obvious that between a heavy front-end and tying the album off with different versions of earlier tracks the album suffers from poor pacing. Though the album may falter it is still an overall strong, unique compilation that is worth a few good listens from fans of reggae or dance hall.
Reviewer: Brian Tracy
new
Reviewer's Rating: 7
Reader's Rating: 0
Reader's Votes: 0
Added: 9-Jun-2006
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