Album Review: The Specials, Encore

[rating]4[/rating]

The Specials’ groundbreaking early records were released against a backdrop of social strife, racial tensions, upheaval in Northern Ireland, and bickering about Britain’s place in the world.

But while things have come full circle outside of the studio, the band’s first original collection in 20 years isn’t quite a return to the motherlode – in large part because their spiritual leader Jerry Dammers remains absent (along with Neville Staple and Roddy ‘Radiation’ Byers and the drummer John Bradbury, who passed away in 2015).

So it’s very much Specials “lite” – as hinted at by the derivative single Vote For Us, which sounds like facsimile of Ghost Town, their great lament from 1981 for Britain’s blighted industrial heartland. Still in the driving seat are vocalist Terry Hall and bass-player Horace Panter, and, on Vote For Us, and elsewhere on the LP, they walk a careful line between harking back to the group’s take no prisoner prime and forging a new path.

They aren’t always successful and Dammers’s mixing desk wizardry is conspicuous by its absence. And yet, as evocation of their truth-speaking glory days it is largely effective. There’s a bracing opener in dance-floor primed Blacked Skinned Blue Eyed Boys, a cover of a 1973 track by The Equals.

"It's a celebration of what The Specials is, and what it's about. That's why I still do it." Terry Hall.

Our new album, Encore, is out now. We're delighted to be able to share it with you all, and we hope you enjoy it.

Get it here: https://t.co/U9Vm0CMffV pic.twitter.com/5I1G8VWjue

— The Specials (@thespecials) February 1, 2019

Social issues later raise their head in a more explicit fashion. Against a sheets of funk guitar, B.L.M. features a spoken word tribute by guitarist Lynval Golding to his father, who arrived in Britain from the Caribbean as part of the Windrush Generation. “He tried to find a room to rent – this was becoming a nightmare for him..he’d knock on door after door after door and a sign on the window kept saying the same thing ..no dogs, no Irish, no blacks.. welcome to England.”

Encore waxes personal as well as political. Terry Hall delves into his private angst on the no-more-explanation required Life and Times (of a a Man Called Depression). And on 10 Commandments there’s a pummelling guest-turn from Saffiyah Khan, the Birmingham model and activist who became an internet meme when an image of her facing down a far-right thug at a protest went viral.

“Pseudo-intellectuals on the internet/They tell me I'm unhappy because I'm not feminine/Failing to consider that I may be unhappy/Because it's 3 AM and I'm in the depths of YouTube/Watching them... whining,” she raps. It’s not Ghost Town but it is something and Specials fans will be cheered that these old ska agitproppers are still manning the barricades